KES (Jennifer Lien) is an Ocampa, a species with a life span of only nine years. Though she appears to be 22 years of age in human years, Kes is actually just two.Tough and rebellious despite her tiny frame, she came aboard the U.S.S. Voyager (NCC-74656) as Neelix's romantic partner and to escape her peoples' passive underground existence in the face of the enslaving, surface-dwelling Kazon-Ogla. She greatly regrets leaving behind her father, Benarem, who died just after her first birthday -- though she still feels his presence as a guide.Aboard the Voyager, she quickly develops her abilities in the medical field and becomes assistant to the ship's holographic Doctor. She also commits herself to studying Vulcan mental discipline. But her most valuable service is probably as a gardener, setting up the first aeroponic/hydroponic garden on board so that Voyager, unable to spare the energy for continual operation of the food replicators, can have a supply of fresh vegetables and herbs.She plays out two distinct time lines. In one, she stays on Voyager for nine years, during which time she grows old, has time to have a daughter and then a grandson. Before then, she sustains contamination with chronoton particles during the Krenem War, also known as the Year of Hell. Toward the end of her life, the Doctor places her into a bio-temporal chamber to try to extend her life. Instead, he sends her jumping backward in time. She barely manages to communicate her plight to an earlier version of Captain Janeway before regressing to a zygotic state--and then coming back to an earlier version of herself.In the second, eventual time line, she undergoes a metamorphosis, shortly after the first Borg adventure, and has to leave Voyager for good. But a particularly vengeful version of herself tries to take her younger self with her--and the younger self rejects the offer. Show less «