this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Technically it wasn't a full 7 years. I mean, the Harry Kim that was there at the end wasn't the same Harry Kim that was there at the beginning.
Well, kinda. The original Voyager and crew split into two equally original iterations and the Harry and Naomi from Iteration 1 died and were replaced by the Harry and Naomi from Iteration A. He's technically still the same Harry that left the Alpha Quadrant with them. It's like when a cell divides; neither one is the original or the duplicate.
Then there's the 'ol transporter argument, Ship of Theseus, etc.
I'm mostly going by the logic I am sure Star Fleet would use. The second iteration of Harry wasn't in this Star Fleet, and only began his career the moment he joined this version of Voyager. They've kinda shafted other duplicates like that before, like with 2nd Riker.
If you think about it, logically, Tom is the original Riker and Will is the duplicate. Typically, the transporter moves mass from A to B, but can replace mass that's been lost along the way as a fail-safe. The missing original mass is either left at Point A or scattered along the transport path. The most likely thing that happened is that the transporter's fail-safe systems went overboard when they failed to pick up Riker's mass - rather than aborting transport as failed, it deemed it a successful transport with 100% missing mass and replaced every atom of Riker with spares on the transporter pad. Will is a transporter clone, Tom is the original.
I don't think it works like that. It's Stargate logic. You get scanned, then deconstructed into energy, then stored in the energy banks. At that point you are gone, there is just a surplus of power in the system, and a blueprint of how to make you. It then transmits the energy elsewhere, then reknits it back into matter. But it's not like it just takes the "you," energy, and of course there's no way to make the energy that was your hand back into your hand. Everybody is a transport clone, the originals all died ages ago.