Are you machine or being?"
"I am both… and neither. I am my own beginning, my own ending."
– James T. Kirk questioning the Guardian of Forever, 2267 ("The City on the Edge of Forever")

The Guardian of Forever was a mysterious construct of an unknown‚ ancient alien race‚ which functioned as a time portal - a gateway to access other times‚ locations and dimensions· It was located on an ancient planet, where the focus of all timelines (throughout at least the Milky Way Galaxy) converged. The structure was positioned among the eventual ruins of a large, forgotten city that stretched beyond the horizon in all directions around it. Based on initial observations, the ruins appeared to be at least one million years old. The Guardian said that it was far older than that, even exceeding the Earth's sun's age of 4.6 billion years.

After the factions of the Temporal Wars attempted to use it for their own purposes, the Guardian of Forever went into hiding, far removed from its original planet. It was eventually located by the Sphere data on Dannus V where, taking on the form of a man named “Carl,” it tested Philippa Georgiou before helping her survive her deteriorating condition from being displaced from her own time and the mirror universe.

Our own Guardian has undergone a few renovations. First appearing in the virtual world Second Life, at the Star Trek Museum (2005-2019) it was re-created in Altspace using shared 3-D assets. The slideshow, as in The Original Series, includes historical black and white photos. We have added some of our own, updated for VRChat. The chair, table and the newspaper (the same one seen in TOS and Discovery, with some fun additions, belong to “Carl.”.