Stardate 48623.5: The ship's sensors pick up a new chemical element inside an asteroid belt. An away team, consisting of Tuvok, B'Elanna Torres and Harry Kim, is surprised to find some kind of cemetery inside an asteroid. When they are beamed back, an alien body has taken Harry's place. Harry, on the other hand, finds himself on the planet of its origin, inside a coffin-like device called cenotaph. The planet's inhabitants, the Vhnori, firmly believe they will transcend to the "next emanation" when they allow themselves to be killed inside a cenotaph just before a phenomenon called a spectral rupture appears. They don't know that the phenomenon is a subspace vacuole and that their dead bodies end up in the asteroid field. In the meantime, more dead bodies materialize on Voyager. The Doctor can revive one of them, a woman named Ptera. On the Vhnori homeworld, Harry is said to be the first one to return from the next emanation, and this discovery may shatter the beliefs of the Vhnori. Before a Vhnori thanatologist named Neria can further examine Harry, he takes the place in the cenotaph of a skeptic who wants to live on. Harry can be resuscitated back on Voyager, while Ptera dies during the attempt to transfer her to her homeworld.

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