In 2279 the Genser and five other vessels were escorting a convoy of neutronic fuel carriers to the rimward frontier when the ship's sensors detected a small object traveling on a parallel course to the convoy.

Communications couldn't be established with the object so the Genser broke off from the convoy and headed off to investigate the object. As the Genser approached the object it disappeared and then reappeared shortly after. When the rest of the convoy couldn't establish contact with the Genser they investigated and found that the object had disappeared along with the Genser's crew.

The Genser continued on active duty but the whereabouts of her missing crew or the mysterious object was never determined, but analysis of the hull as well as hull plating from the missing Chandly class frigate USS Blackheart NCC-2327 by the Daystrom Institute of Technology led to the invention of the Quantum Para-Dimensional Transport Device (colloquially known as the Silver Ball). Highly classified, the Silver Ball is best described as a jump drive capable of propeling the ship through hyperspace (a theorised companion phenomenon to subspace).

In 2290, the USS Odyssey NCC-2001 was accidentally transported during a Silver Ball jump, to a pocket universe in which a structure called the Museum at the End of Time was base to 60 starships which over time had stumbled upon the Museum and become trapped in the pocket universe. The Museum's pocket universe was a place where time flowed differently from the mainstrean universe. The Curator of the Museum, named as a color, shade of purple-grey but known simply as Purple, along with his deputy, a large caninoid quadruped called Hilliard; had organised a Council of Captains which included the commanding officers of all the ships in what would later be called the Rag Tag Fleet. A member of this Council was a Starfleet officer, Captain Alistair "Al" MacCay. He and his crew had been trapped in the Museum's universe, albeit without his ship.

Commodore Bradron McCurrvey along with Captains Thelev and Mercer, also of the Odyssey, determined that MacCay was from their own timeline having disappeared eleven years earlier.

Tremors and discontinuities similar to the so-called Lazarus Effect recorded on stardate 3087.6 began affecting the pocket universe and stars on its perphery began winking out. The universe was in a slow-motion implosion. Later investigation would indicate that the Silver Ball effect had interacted with the pocket universe and caused the destruction. As the effects increased, it became clear that the universe would completely self destruct in an ever-decreasing timeframe. It was determined that the entire Rag Tag Fleet (so named by Dr. John Smith after a 20th century television programme) cound be accommodated with in the spherical envelope of the Quantum Para-Dimensional Transport Field and the Odyssey could rescue the entire 6000+ stranded persons.

The Odyssey initiated Blue Alert and jumped at the last moment, arriving at Bridgetown Station after an absence of six months. The USS Genser was at the end of its tour of duty and Starfleet assigned it to Bridgetown Station.