Kirk had not let go his grip on Jim’s arms, and now he called to mind another location, a safe place where he’d been alone. With the stars still surrounding them, Kirk felt something beneath his feet. He peered downward as he felt the pull of gravity, and he saw grass below him. Looking up, he saw that he and Jim now stood amid trees and other modest growth, in what looked to be a wide parkland. An airpod sat nearby, its gull-wing hatch propped open.

Before him, Jim turned in a circle, inspecting their new locale. Three-quarters of the way around, he stopped and raised an arm, pointing. “That’s Mojave,” he said. Kirk looked that way and saw the towers and spires of the California metropolis, saw the stylized four-posted arch that rose majestically from the lake at the city’s eastern end. “I was only here once.”

“After reading a biography of Christopher Pike,” Kirk said.

“Yes,” Jim agreed. “When I was chief of Starfleet Operations.” He continued looking toward the city. “Captain Pike was born and raised there,” he said. “He used to ride horses out here when he was a boy. They’ve got a memorial to him at the city center.”

Kirk stepped forward, interposing himself between Jim and the city. “Except that’s not really Mojave,” he said, “and we’re not really on Earth. We’re in some type of- “

“Temporal nexus,” Jim said along with him. “Yes, I heard you.” He turned and paced away, but then peered back at Kirk. “I remember Picard,” he said. “I remember deciding to leave the nexus and help him, but then…then I didn’t. I stayed, got caught up again in the events of my own life…” The realization appeared to agitate him.

“It’s all right,” Kirk said. “But now I need your help.”

“You need my help?” Jim said. “Here in the nexus?”

“No. Back in the real universe where we lived our life,” Kirk said. “When I left here with Picard, we were successful in stopping Soran, but then something else happened.”

“Something else?” Jim said.

“Something that I-that we-essentially caused,” Kirk said. “A phenomenon known as a converging temporal loop.” He explained what he had witnessed on Veridian Three, as well as the concept of the loop as described by Data. “It’s destroyed a sizable volume of the space-time continuum and taken many lives, perhaps millions, perhaps even many more than that.”

Jim padded back across the grass until he stood directly in front of Kirk. It should’ve seemed like gazing into a mirror, Kirk thought, but it didn’t. The image he always saw when he peered at his reflection showed him the reverse of his features, which didn’t happen here as he looked at this echo of himself. “And you think what?” Jim asked. “That we can go back in time, somehow stop it from occurring.”

“Not we,” Kirk told him. “You.” And then he explained his plan.

SIX

(2271)/2282

Jim Kirk trod back and forth across the grass in the parkland adjoining the city of Mojave. He had just listened to—

Myself? he thought, the very notion absurd on the face of it. Except not all that absurd, he amended, thinking of the incident back during the Enterprise’s five-year mission when a transporter malfunction had produced two versions of him.

And yet this doesn’t seem like that, Kirk thought. Back in orbit of Alfa 177, where the transporter accident had taken place, neither of the two Kirk identities that had been created-and he could still remember existing as each of them-had felt entirely like himself. Right now, though, he did feel whole, and he suspected that his doppelganger did as well.

Kirk glanced over at his double, who appeared to match him precisely, but for the visible effects of the fall he said he’d taken on Veridian Three. Both dirt and blood covered his hands and face as well as his uniform, which had been ripped in many places. According to him, he had been crushed by a metal bridge and on the verge of death when he had been swept back into the nexus. He also believed that he had beheld a powerful destructive force called a converging temporal loop. He now wanted to leave the nexus and go back in time to prevent the loop from ever developing, though he claimed that he could not do so himself as he would, upon exiting this timeless place, die as a result of his injuries.

As fantastic as Kirk found the collection of details he’d just been given, all of it seemed to make an internal kind of sense, but for one thing. He stopped pacing about and addressed that now. “You said that the convergence loop was caused by there being two large, identical sets of chronometric particles in our universe, connected by the conduit of the nexus,” he said.

“That’s right,” the other, bloodied Kirk said, nodding.

“And that those particles were in our body,” Kirk said. Again, his duplicate nodded. “So if I leave the nexus, won’t that unleash another temporal loop?”

“I was concerned about that myself,” the other Kirk said. “But right now, neither of those sets of chronometric particles exists in our universe because the converging loop destroyed them. If you leave and succeed in preventing the loop, then the conditions that caused it in the first place-the two sets of particles joined together by the nexus-will never arise.”

“Right,” Kirk said. He understood the logical argument that the other Kirk had just put forward, but thinking about these time-related concepts seemed dizzying. It’s more than dealing with time, Kirk thought. It’s also about not wanting to leave the nexus. “Why should I trust you?” he said, hunting for a reason to stay here, but as soon as the words had left his mouth, he knew they carried no weight.

“I think you do trust me,” the other Kirk said. “I think you know who I am. I think you know that I’m you.”

Kirk nodded, unable to do anything but agree. He looked away, toward the beautiful city of Mojave off in the distance, then back at his other self. “What if I don’t want to leave the nexus?” he said, choosing to speak more plainly. He remembered refusing and then acquiescing to Picard’s request for assistance in stopping Soran, but he also recalled all of the joyous times of his life that he had lived and relived here, mostly before that, but also afterward. He had agreed to exit the nexus with Picard, but then he hadn’t done so, instead experiencing that first meeting with Antonia all over again.

“What can you tell me that I haven’t already thought of myself?” the other Kirk said. “We both know that none of this- ” He spread his arms wide, taking in the extent of their surroundings. “- is real. We’ve been through the same events here.”

“Not all the same events,” Kirk said. “I got to meet Antonia for the first time again, and it was different. I made it different. I can go back to our relationship and this time make it work.”

The other Kirk walked over to him. “You made it different how?” he asked, his tone almost combative. “You know, because I know, that no matter what you did, no matter what you changed, it would still never work out.”

“I told her who I was,” Kirk said. “This time, I didn’t hide my identity from her.” In the real universe, Kirk had simply given Antonia his name, but here in the nexus, he had also mentioned that he’d retired from Starfleet. “I told her flatly that very first time that my life in the space service was over,” Kirk continued. “I didn’t wait until later, and this time, I won’t act in a way that allows her to doubt my commitment to her. This time, I’ll keep all of those implicit and explicit promises I made and I’ll stay with her. This time, I won’t let myself desire a return to Starfleet.”

“‘Desire a return to Starfleet?’” said the other Kirk. “Jim,” he went on, the name sounding odd coming from his lips, “you know you didn’t leave Antonia because you wanted to go back to Starfleet. You went back to Starfleet so that Antonia would leave you.”

Kirk said nothing, recognizing the hard truth of the other Kirk’s words.