Chapter Text
Space, the Final Frontier.
-8-
"I've had it with this school."
Harry was relieved to get into the Room of Requirement; he'd endured a whole day of Granger and Weasley and McGonagall, trying to make him go to the corridor where the 3-headed dog was living on.
Granger and Weasley both tried to get him to listen, but he had managed to avoid them both. With McGonagall, she was trying to find ways of getting him into detention; she had succeeded, but Harry had learnt that Dumbledore and she had conspired to put him in detention where little clues and hints about the corridor would be dropped.
It had been 3 weeks since Harry had decided how to use the Room of Requirement, and he wished he had implemented his plans, but thanks to the long wait, he'd had more time to make newer plans.
When he was living at Little Whinging, he had occasionally watched TV at Mrs Figg, although not often - Harry still didn't understand if Dumbledore had gotten his stupid squib spy to actively make him more downtrodden and bored, so by the time the Dursleys returned, then he'd be overjoyed by their very presence, hence why she made him sit through those godawful cat albums instead of just leaving him alone.
Harry closed his eyes, remembering how the woman refused to leave him alone. But when he had the chance to watch some TV, he loved some of the shows.
When he'd watched Star Trek, it had been the episode with the first Klingon shown on TV. Harry wasn't exactly a fan of the series; while the series had inspired hundreds of people into developing tech similar to Captain Kirk's communicator, and scientists wondered if Scotty's transporter could work in reality, he didn't believe such a utopia could actually exist.
That was why he was here, gaining experience for meddling with history while he made preparations to leave the castle, and the magical world when his next year came.
A part of Harry was looking forward to seeing what would happen then.
Sometime… in the Room of Requirement, Harry had seen the way history would unfold. He knew when Voldemort would return in one timeline, but he knew there were other possibilities. Harry knew he had to be free to be truly independent. He hoped nothing happened…Never.
Harry stared down at the sleeping body of Gene Roddenberry, trying hard not to dance a victorious jig as he stood there. He had arrived in the past, about a month before the legendary screenwriter.
It had been a month - relatively speaking, for Harry - since he'd drawn up some rough, basic plans on what he should do about the Room of Requirement, and the best ways he could meddle in history when he remembered the Klingons, and Star Trek, and he'd begun studying the basics of Star Trek, and he realised something important about it to begin with; Star Trek was struggling from low ratings, a lack of substantial stories, and it's special effects were rather limited.
One of Roddenberry's biggest problems was that he was too optimistic about his vision for the future. Harry was more realistic, he doubted humans would change, ever, and he compared Star Trek with other sci-fi shows; Lost in Space, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Halo, and even Sapphire & Steel, and he realised better stories, more character development, and more action based storylines, another thing to look into was how some of those other series preferred using serialised storylines compared to the original Star Trek.
At the same time, Star Trek did explore an extremely rich and diverse universe, similar to Star Wars. But it was so episodic, and there wasn't enough character development to make them less than bland, while Star Wars was a saga with a beginning, a middle, and an ending detailing the story of the heroes, and the downfalls of the villains, dropping in twists like Vader's revelation to Luke.
He had dozens of ideas, but he had been fantasising about seeing an alternative Star Trek where Gene Roddenberry had been both optimistic and yet realistic about his creation. He wanted Kirk to fight Klingons, Romulans, and other enemies, such as Khan, perhaps, or others. But Roddenberry had been clear: there was to be no real conflict.
But there were ways of changing that, but as he'd spent the last week making his plans, Harry discovered getting to Roddenberry and other TV screenwriters to put in his changes was going to be easier than actually manipulating their minds. Here, in America, with MACUSA keeping a beady eye out for witches and wizards older than himself casting magic on muggles, or No-Maj's, Harry knew he'd be caught in a heartbeat.
But after doing some research, Harry discovered something really important; he could use ancient runes to do the job, and so he had looked into the science, but he hit another block. He was a long way from being an expert, and a bit more research later, and he had found a way of looking into their minds using the mind arts, and using a technique inspired by Joe 90, a Gerry Anderson TV series, and he had the knowledge of experts, and could inscribe runes without any real experience, and yet with that knowledge it was like he'd been doing it for years.
Harry had created a small number of rune clusters, which could sink into the skin of the Muggle, and they'd spread instructions into the mind, but to do it properly, the knowledge of the more experienced rune experts would need to be activated.
Roddenberry stirred, moaning a little; Harry kept very still, knowing it was because the muggle was actively fighting the new thoughts bombarding his mind, but it settled down very quickly.
Harry tapped the runes on the sides of his glasses. Suddenly, he gasped as it felt as if his brain had inflated with decades' worth of knowledge and experience in different fields of magic.
"Man, I can get used to this," he breathed, but he got to work, remembering his task, and he took out the small box he was carrying, and he placed the small, expertly carved runes on and around Roddenberry's head. They glowed a light, electric blue, then white, and then they sank slowly into his head, the runes spreading out across Roddenberry's skull, like luminous weeds, and then they vanished.
Harry stayed there for a long moment, watching, and then he nodded in satisfaction. It was done.
-8-
As he continued to tune in on that world, Harry noticed something. The whole tone of Star Trek began to change; while its themes of exploration remained, it had definitely changed. In Harry's universe, Star Trek would begin with several pilot episodes: The Cage, Where No Man Has Gone Before.
But now they were totally different. While the Enterprise did explore other worlds, Captain Pike and his crew's mission was stopped when they encountered the Klingons, who captured an Earth colony, and set themselves up as villains who committed mass murder, slavery. Harry had never seen the Cage, personally, but he knew enough about it to know it wasn't exactly exciting by his standards.
The original pilot Harry knew of would be unrecognisable compared to this. The episode of this reality, named The Massacre, which was truly eye-catching, aired January 23, 1965. It was serialised in 5 episodes, with the ending showing the death of Captain Pike, who sacrificed himself to save hundreds of lives, while his second in command, Number One, saved the ship.
Where No Man Had Gone Before, in Harry's universe, was all about a godlike individual.
Not so here.
In this universe, Where No Man Had Gone Before was actually another battle, with the Enterprise, now under the command of Jim Kirk, and engaging in another brutal war.
For both of them, Harry was truly pleased that his experiment had worked, and as he reviewed the results, he saw that the Star Trek aired in this universe would be well known for it's thoughtful themes, but juicy action would make it exceptionally popular, while all the time showing that while on the surface, Earth was utopia, it hadn't changed that much, but they tried their best to be better, and that made it more genuine than what Harry's universe's variant had.
When the movies aired, forget the boring Motion Picture; it was replaced by a sci-fi epic of an alien empire wanting to conquer and enslave the human race and the other races of the Federation.
Harry was truly pleased; Star Trek 2, 3, and 4…were largely the same, and instead of that godawful god movie, Star Trek 5 showed the Enterprise encountering the martial and barbaric Terran Empire, after he had manipulated the writers using some material from his own universe, showing the Terran Empire in the throes of its death, and wanting to conquer the Federation both as revenge and because of the new frontier.
For his own amusement, Harry actually snuck into that universe at a different time, and he actually purchased the DVDs of the series - unlike the actual series in his universe, the show's popularity meant it actually lasted the full 5 years.
But Harry wanted to go further than that, much further.
-8-
Moving the timeline forward to the production of The Next Generation, Harry shook his head; his conditioning of Roddenberry had worked for the most part, but his original desires of the show to have nothing but exploration, little conflict, and little character development stood out. Harry once more had to reapply the conditioning, mostly suggestions….the end result?
Star Trek: The Next Generation was a lot like the original series, with more than one starship, embarking on a long mission of deep space exploration. But the first series episodes, while largely intact for the most part, had more character development, and a new Galactic War broke out after aliens brutalised Federation colonists, forcing them into launching a war. It was brief, taking up no more than 12 episodes, but it had worked, and there was another war, where the Klingons and Romulans got into a fight without any clear victors, and the Federation was pulled into it.
The second season opened with the Enterprise being pulled into a region of space with hundreds of spaceships, many of them fighting one another, but they managed to return home after 12 episodes. The series ended with the Borg encounter, and the promise that they'll be there.
For the third season, the Borg storyline was much longer, more detailed, and more ominous. At the end of the arc, there was more detail into its long-term impact, with many demanding militant actions, and so on.
Later seasons witnessed more parallel universes and time travel episodes, even other cybernetic species that were a threat, and there was even an arc where the Enterprise found itself stranded in another universe, one where the Federation was never formed, and humanity was enslaved to the Klingons.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager, once he'd had the chance to watch them, also featured some alterations. For Deep Space Nine, which had plenty of action, hundreds of plot twists, and plenty of character development, Harry's only tweaks featured more exploration into the Gamma Quadrant and in the Mirror Universe, which was the first.
In the arc where Earth became more paranoid, Admiral Leyton did create a dictatorship, which would cause greater harm further down the line, forcing DS9 to break away, along with many other ships and colonies, and create a brief Federation-Starfleet civil war.
More Section 31, and for Dr Bashir, once his genetically engineered history came out, he received greater backlash, more prejudice. So much for an evolved human race, yeah right...evolved because they had made friendly contact with aliens? Get real.
Star Trek Voyager was more radical in Harry's mind, especially once he'd read about Captain James Cook's expeditions in the Pacific and watched Lost in Space, and even a bit of Stargate Universe, and Sliders in a way, which gave him the inspiration he needed.
For a start, there would be more conflict between the Starfleet crew and the Maquis crew, causing more problems further down the line; he didn't understand why the writers and producers were so… timid about writing conflicts, but in this reality, he drove it so that by the end, they'd be stronger in the end.
Next, Harry made sure the crew's situation was hopeless. They wouldn't be travelling on a pleasure yacht, more like a warship constantly under fire. But that was good, they explored large chunks of the part of space they were in. Harry was intrigued the most by the alien subspace underspace corridors, and he had them discovered by the crew earlier on, so they were lost without any proper route home. And he made sure the network was found in season 5 in the earliest episodes, but by that point, the series was one of the most popular series on TV. The network took them to dozens of worlds and parts of the galaxy, getting them involved with so many things.
No temporal reset button, he made sure the ship was destroyed in season 4 by the alien race called the Krenim, and they were left scavenging in a small, but growing fleet. They would settle on planets and gather supplies. This was the key, the ticket to Voyager's long-term success; it was the first time ever a leading starship was destroyed, with the crew forced to make do. This led to a huge amount of chaos for the crew, and they had to grow; the Voyager crew reunited, and they managed to capture the alien starship, Dauntless, which was being used by the grieving alien Arturis. But he was beaten, and his ship was stolen, and the rest of the crew were brought on board. This happened at the end of season 4, but it wouldn't be until the beginning of season 7.
So, in season 4, the ship would be destroyed, a large group of survivors would find the network of underspace corridors in season 5, and for that time forward, the story focus would shift from one group to the next, while the Dauntless struggled to find the others, struggling with personal and external conflicts.
Equinox took 5 episodes, not 2. In that arc, the Voyager crew members realised Ransom was right, and more of the Equinox crew survived than a small party.
Once his meddling was finished, Harry was delighted. It had taken him 9 days, but he was pleased with his work. One thing he did make sure of, once he'd gotten the DVD collections, was to look at what scientific advances came out of all of it. The warp drive, for instance, was well documented and described, as were time travel methods, robotics, and so on. Harry was pleased; he'd been worried about whether or not scientists and engineers would be inspired or not, but thanks to plucking real things like stellar engines, Dyson swarms, zero gravity, and living on space habitats, Star Trek had inspired hundreds of people over the generations.
Soon, he planned to see if he could meddle in his own reality and implement the same changes.