The First Splinter was an alternate timeline that was created by an attempt by the Borg to eliminate the starship Enterprise-E using a temporal beam. (ST - Coda novel: Oblivion's Gate)

History and specifics[]

In the year 2373, the Borg made an attempt to send a Borg sphere to Earth's past using a chronometric vortex, after losing their Borg cube in the Battle of Sector 001. The Enterprise-E immediately followed, and were taken afloat in the sphere's temporal wake. While in the temporal wake, they saw the final effect of the Borg's tampering with history — the Earth of the Borg timeline, completely assimilated.

The Enterprise followed the sphere into the past and succeeded in saving their own history. (TNG movie, novelization & comic adaptation: First Contact)

However, for the time that the temporal vortex existed, the Borg on the assimilated Earth could observe the Enterprise, just as the Enterprise crew had observed the results of the Borg timeline. When the Enterprise re-opened the vortex to return home, the Borg devised a plan to strike out at the Enterprise using a temporal weapon of their own. The Borg weapon had no discernible effect on the Enterprise's return home, but the resulting temporal incursion fractured the fabric of space and time, creating an parallel, unstable timeline called the First Splinter. Wesley Crusher later dubbed this sequence as the ODE — the original divergence event. (ST - Coda novel: Oblivion's Gate)

At first, the two timelines were identical, except for the inherent instability of the First Splinter. Every subsequent incidence of time travel and other temporal disruption caused additional divergences and "splinters" to form.

One of the major divergences was the reaction in the prime timeline to the discovery of instability in the Romulan system's star, which led to Jean-Luc Picard being promoted to admiral by Fleet Admiral Victor Bordson to command the evacuation of Romulan space aboard the USS Verity. In the First Splinter timeline, Picard remained in command of the Enterprise-E at the rank of captain, and Akaar was the C-in-C of Starfleet, not Bordson. (Star Trek: Picard; PIC novel: The Last Best Hope)

In the First Splinter timeline, Starfleet and the Federation were besieged by the Borg Invasion of 2381, leaving lasting damage to planetary populations and galactic politics. (Destiny; Typhon Pact; The Fall)

The Devidians were able to utilize the fracture that created this timeline in order to consume entire timelines for neural energy. In order to save the rest of existence, the inhabitants of this timeline prevented it from coming into existence retroactively. This resulted in them never having existed, but restored/protected all other realities from Devidian predation. (Coda)

Since the prime universe and the mirror universe are intertwined, the First Splinter divergence also generated a parallel, alternate version of the mirror reality, notable for the rise of the Galactic Commonwealth. (Mirror Universe)

Appendices[]

Background[]

The First Splinter timeline concept was introduced in the closing installment of Coda, Oblivion's Gate. The establishment of this timeline branching from the closing scenes of First Contact was intended to retroactively encompass the continuity of all crossover-oriented Pocket Books prose taking place after the finales of the respective series—the so-called "relaunches" of TNG, DS9 and VOY and tie-ins to various spinoff series, including New Frontier, SCE, Titan and Prometheus.

The implication exists that aspects of the continuity of those series that was not directly contradicted by Picard and Lower Decks may be "intact". However, future developments could clarify that not to be the case.

It was not immediately apparent whether the First Splinter timeline retroactive continuity would apply to parts of the prose publishing program that were not part of the "mainstream" crossover-oriented relaunches—such as standalone prose taking place after the year 2373, short stories of the Strange New Worlds contests, and the works of William Shatner's series. Also in question are products from other publishers that tied in to the relaunches—such as Star Trek Online and the comic series Divided We Fall, N-Vector (from WildStorm Comics) and New Frontier (from both IDW Publishing and WildStorm).

Also unclear is the fate of prose series that have involved time travel with the First Splinter timeline, such as DTI and ENT, both of which have elements that were involved in Star Trek: Destiny and other time travel stories.