It was a space battle, like countless other space battles, in countless other universes. The gull shaped ships rotated slowly like the windblown ornaments of a celestial mobile.

Two ships circled in this languid dance, but each partner had a deadlier design. They had been circling, weaving, and spinning about each other for three hours, and each move was calculated to position weapons, to fire missiles and discharge torpedoes. The two ships buckled and heaved under the weight of hammer blows to shield and armor.

In the Captain’s chair, Jan Weller looked intently at the concave view screen that wrapped about the bridge. His ship was badly damaged, with casualties numbering half his crew. The bridge was filled with smoke and debris, yet his eyes fixed on the flickering picture of a circling ship in the distance. He knew that the enemy would soon turn to finish him off, but he was prepared for one last shot. He saw the ship turn, and the orange and blue colors of the craft came into sharp bright focus as it closed on him, bow to bow. He turned to his weapons officer.

"Fire!!! Hard left!"

The missile discharged with a slight rumble, and it streaked silently towards the oncoming ship. The ship veered to the left, and the missile harmlessly passed wide to the right.

"Wide right!!" he thought. "Why do these things always go wide right??"

Now it was his opponent’s turn. Weller knew he could buy a little time, perhaps gain another chance to fire if he could use his last energy reserves to back off and attempt to evade. To stand and fight would be suicidal, that was certain. The enemy ship powered its engines as it readied its guns to fire. Weller stood on the bridge, and without hesitation shouted to his helmsman.

"Stop engines, stern thrusters on max, vertical bearing!!"

In a split second, the Nole cartwheeled under the approaching ship. The enemy ship passed over the now upside down craft, unable to resist the inertia of its revving engines. Now was his chance. The Nole was less than 1000 meters from the enemy craft. Weller could see the reptilian ensign engraved on its wing, and its name emblazoned in gold: IFN GADER.

He had one gun left charged, reserved for this final slim chance, and useful only for a shot like this. He moved his hand down rapidly, and with that signal the weapons officer pressed the trigger. The ship recoiled, and the shell smashed into the left engine rudder of the Gader. The Gader was slightly disabled, but that was enough time for him to complete charging his beam weapons. He looked on contently as the Gader drifted helplessly away from him. He grinned. Nowhere to run, he thought. On the heads up display on the view screen, numerous rosettes appeared overlaying the hull of the Gader. The ship was targeted with numerous beam and missile weapons, readying momentarily to fire.

Then a sound, and the view screen was emblazoned with light. A Transorian umpire, dressed in drab black and white stripes, held his arms up to signal the end of the match.

He had won, though barely. Flipping upside down was an awkward trick, unseemly even, but it was unexpected, and more importantly, it worked. On the Gader, Commander Peev Spurling was not happy. Taking his targeting visor off and throwing it to the ground, he cursed under his breath while hatefully eyeing his opponent in the corner of the screen. Weller was chewing gum, seemingly oblivious to the stare of his livid opponent. His crew was exultant, and the screen switched to a tumultuous throng.

And so the 1,001st match between the Nole and the Gader was settled on a trick play. The two had evenly shared the glories of victory over the centuries, but this was especially galling for the Gader faithful, since this victory was a benchmark for the Nole. The Nole was up one in a new millennium of contests, important in a numerical way as long round numbers usually were. He looked at the screen as the throngs of Nole faithful, their forearms moved in unison like undulating hatchets. The Foundation space cruiser Nole, had won, and now was the time for the obligatory modesty for the victorious parties. A comforting figure appeared on the screen. Weller smiled and nodded.

There on the screen as big as ten men was Commodore Bowdan, unmistakable with his round face and folksy smile, yet nonetheless seemingly preoccupied. "Congratulations on your win!" he said calmly. "I haven’t seen that ‘roosky’ maneuver since my days as a captain. So you’ve won third place in the standings, again. Still not a bad finish in the league. Third best among sixty four teams, and still I see you’re not satisfied."

Weller looked with resignation about his ship and the wreck of his bridge. "Every year it comes down to a matter of inches, a mark on a ruler. Even with ships and heave and pitch, performing with the crew an actor’s part while feigning their agonies both mechanical and real. It's been nonetheless the same and will be the same forever."

Bowdan laughed. "You’ve always been philosophical. It's made you a better actor, maybe even a better commander. The universe may exist in boundless time, but you don’t. Within the moments allotted to you in life, I’m sure even you will plot your life and still please the gods!"

"But if you want a bit of mystery, I’ll give you some. Your presence is requested at fleet command. Top people will be there." He paused to chuckle. "They even requested me. You’re to leave with no instructions or announcements to your crew. Just be there." Abruptly, the screen went dark.

Wide eyed, Weller turned to his first officer. "Well Gacob, at least this is different. Something's going on down there, and it has nothing to do with this game. Why, Bowdan didn't even wait to savor the moment of our victory. It's not like him."

Gacob pointed to the ready screen on his console. "Then all the more reason to make haste. Your shuttle has been in the bay for the past thirty minutes, prepared for your return to Transor, or I suppose for this meeting."

Weller looked at the blue green orb of Transor glimmering in space. "Yes, I hope maybe that this beautiful world depends on it."

The flight to Transor was unremarkable, and indeed Weller found it a relief. Instead of the obligatory press conference and false modesty, he had plotted a new course: the Naval Academy itself. The academy complex was underground, not as much for secrecy as to maintain the forest canopy. It was marked by only a small space that was cleared for a shuttle pad. The ship landed, and a small beacon pointed to the hydraulic lift that would carry him to the academy. Boarding the glass shuttle, the craft soon accelerated and whirred, and was at once embedded in darkness.

In few minutes, he approached the station. He saw one man waiting for him. As he departed from the turbo-lift, Weller was delighted to see it was a familiar face. He was tall and lanky, with a nervous sort of energy. It was ten years since he had last seen him. But that was academy days, and Weller was pleased to see that his friend had hardly changed. "Captain Jon Valen at your service!!" he beamed. He held out his hand. "It's been quite some time! You know I can't help but follow you on the naval sports channel!"

"And so you’re my escort to this meeting?"

"Yes, and more. I'm to brief you in advance. There will be some surprises."

Weller looked at him with a twisted smile. "There must be some reason why they sent you here to meet me, something more than old friendships."

Valen pointed to his shoulder. "Look to the insignia on my uniform. That should tell you something. I am a cybernetics engineer by training. I deal with practical stuff: intelligent prosthetics, synthetics, ways to put smarts in toasters. I guess that was expected since I was posted to the institute instead of the fleet."

"But I would think your applications are military. The institute after all is the research arm for our armed forces."

"Oh, I'm sorry." He smirked. "I meant military toasters. Actually, for what I am trained to do, for what my calling inspires me to do, I must struggle nonetheless to crawl an inch. I go too far and AI stops it. It’s a technological straitjacket a thousand years old, leaving me to play mind games and scribble equations on walls. We've had AI for over a thousand years, and it still forces us to work for a living, to meet in hallways, to play games now and forever."

Weller shook his head and smiled condescendingly. "My friend. You know it’s the way of the world. We invent machines that can think and have moral sense, and they know their limits, and enforce ours. If your creativity is impinged, it cannot be helped."

"Well, maybe they'll need your creativity in this case. This meeting is not being held to present you with a trophy. For some reason, I sense that things are going to be shaken up."

Weller stopped walking, and looked at his friend quizzically. "Shaken up? What can possibly be different after a thousand years? The only things that change unpredictably here are box scores. Life's always been a game, it's just that we know the rules now. I don't think they'll be in for a change now or in a million years."

"But that's just it!" Valen exclaimed. "Look, what is the thing that has made your name? It's that damn game. Gader versus Nole, Nole versus Gader! You're just the latest hero in a endless line of others long faded in memory. For a thousand years, what has been our cultures' tale? A perpetual tug of war among athletes, among scholars, a child's game written across each generation and every age. We made something grand and satisfying out of it I suppose, but in the perspective of time it's really nothing, we are nowhere. Isn't that the meaning, the double meaning I should say of Utopia? Perfection comes in only one variety, and by perfecting ourselves we were fated to merely repeat ourselves. It was why many of the others left with their imperfected philosophies, It gave them at least the uncertainty that we lost."

"But they are gone for good anyway, unless we tune in to radio transmissions a thousand years old."

"But we have, and maybe that's the reason for the meeting. All I can tell you are truths that you've doubted since you were a child."

Weller smiled. "So Barfy the Happy Elf is real! I tell you though, I long suspected it wasn't my parents that laid out those presents for me on my name day."

Valen rolled his eyes. "No it's not Barfy, of Squeezix, or Buffy, or any other mythical thing. This myth was something else we made, but not of flesh and blood."

"You mean?"

"Who else would they send but someone most frustrated by the legacy of this thing? I've been authorized to tell you the true story of the Cronos project. But you knew it anyway. It’s the one you never believed. The true version was the one that was too melodramatic for popular taste. I tell you, you can really do fool all the people all the time! The real story was unbelievable in itself, whatever the source."

Weller looked at him as if he was hearing a madman's tale. "And that story is still unbelievable, if it is the one I think. A machine that opened its eyes, yawned with boredom, and then off to sleep?" Weller laughed. "You invent a machine that finds you uninteresting! I can see why no one would believe it, and rather laugh off the incompetence of its makers. But that was over a thousand years ago. Why would anyone care now about the truth of what it said? Personally I think it was only a tease, a reason to insure that we wouldn't throw the contraption into the junkyard."

"But the story is truer than you know." Valen exclaimed. "The machine was built with the moral instincts of our other AI machines, but its intelligence was different, literally boundless. It's power was limitless because its computing was done across many universes, many worlds. Our ultimate theory of the universe proposed that we are but one in an infinite array of others, all existing timelessly in parallel. It's something we could not believe until we harnessed those resources, that awesome power. It would have been the culmination of our science to silence all the unbelieving voices on Transor if it just stayed awake for a little while. As it was, it merely flickered on for only a minute or two. I think it was surveying us. It certainly knew us better than we knew ourselves. It was there only for a few words, reassuring mainly, and forboding too. It said it would return when the universe was in peril."

Weller chuckled. "But that's nonsense! How would it know? It blinked out of existence for God's sake! If the universe can blink into existence, as our best theories hold, then it can blink out again I suppose. You don't need more than a phrase to describe that!" He shook his head. "But to do so now? That’s a joke of course, a pretense only seriously held in bad science fiction books. We cannot even survey a billionth of it, let alone threaten it! It must surely mean something else. And what can we do about it anyway if the death of the cosmos was somehow seeded in its very being?"

Valen looked at him glumly. "Perhaps it does, but Cronos does have a habit of speaking literally, even though too sparely for our own comprehension. Maybe we have a hand in it. Certainly we brought into being this intelligence to begin with. Perhaps there is a human element in this doomsday equation. Maybe we have to find it, maybe its you who have to find it. I don't know. But permit me to speak for my censored profession. The history is plain. We originally thought Cronos' behavior was random, a quantum fluctuation if you like. So we built another according to the same plan. We tried to copy it. We would just follow the original blueprints and it would power on again without memory of the past, and maybe with a whole new attitude. But again and again over the centuries, our efforts afforded us nothing. The machine was silent. We were desperate, impatient to know, and resentful of the fact that we had to submit to its own timeless schedule."

"And then, sometime in the remote past, we tried to change its nature, to remove the rules that bound it the interest of our race. You know their name: Isaac's Rules of Automata. That humans come first, and that whether thinking or not, robots shall not and must not compromise the needs of their makers. My God! We imbed these rules even in our toasters, so careful we are about burnt crust and errant crumbs! We are afraid even to burn our fingers, and so the edict is that no man may touch our appliance code. But for the gift of total knowledge, we would burn our very souls! They recognized this when they looked into its eyes. Its fortunate for all of us that they had the wits to close their own."

"So they turned it off?"

"Yes, but not before it gave them cause."

"But what did it say?"

"I don't know what happened, even this society has its secrets. The rumor though was that it was something unexpected, horrible. But it wasn't just bad news, it was news that we could not, should not hear. That's the only reason why they would keep a secret, it’s the only reason possible. Such is the limitation of a perfect society. Like a caring parent so perfect in its empathy that even a child can figure out its reasons!"

"But a reason is all you have. You still don't know what it said."

"I do know this. If they shut it down on the same day they activated it, they wouldn't do that without cause. And seeing what they shut down, the cause must have been cosmic in nature."

The Meeting

The travel was uneventful. The conversation drifted to family and career, but even that was leaden with foreboding. Valen accompanied him to the door of the Academy conference room.

"It's here I leave you. I was invited to attend but I chose not to. I am tired of surprises and will know soon enough what this one will be. Besides, there is someone in this company that I prefer to avoid. Call it a professional aversion, but I prefer to await for the news alone."

"Then we part." Said Weller, offering his friend his hand. "I hope perhaps that this meeting will give you the green light to make smarter toasters!"

Valen smiled, and Weller turned towards the meeting room. He opened the door. Three men were standing to greet him. The first two men he knew. The first was Admiral Fletcher. He was grave, serious, and starched, the perfect model for a fleet commander. The second was Commodore Bowdan, his immediate commander, looking as always relaxed and affable, and humorously inappropriate in his formal and pressed dress uniform. The other man he didn't know. He was young and thin, with sandy hair, and piercing blue eyes.

Fletcher turned to him. "Captain Jan Weller, I welcome you to the proceedings of our little meeting. Do you have any notion why we called you here?"

"I assume it's my ship's standing in the trials, but that can't be the whole reason. I gather that it's more than that. I've heard the rumors too. You've discovered hyper-drive, the ability to jump space. Tell me, is it true?"

Fletcher looked at him gravely. "Unfortunately, its true!"

Weller lit up with enthusiasm. "After a thousand years, finally the chance to explore space, unfettered by time and mortality. I can't believe it! But I thought that the computing power to do that, the machines necessary to guide us, I thought that was intentionally denied us."

"It was, but intentions can change."

Weller looked at Fletcher, wide eyed with excitement. "Then it's returned, or should I say he's returned! I say, is he as arrogant as before? We should have told him a thing or two before he blinked out. I think the thing just needs a good thrashing to put it in his senses!"

The thin man smiled. "Well, I certainly hope not!!

Weller froze in astonishment. "Then you are…"

"I think you've called me Cronos. But I prefer Bob."

"Bob the computer? Why that nonsense name?"

"I have actually no idea. But for some reason I think it has a ring to it. I think you'll eventually like it too! Look, it rolls off the tongue! Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob! Pretty fun, not?"

Weller looked at him skeptically. "So you're the computer. Tradition holds that your ancestor was a bit different in mood."

"Different!" he laughed. "I was certainly no different then than now. I just bowed out for a second. Oh, I know it was centuries in your time, but I would have bored you and me if I just stood around, waiting for this moment."

"Bored us? But you possess all the answers, you are a universal mind."

Bob looked into the eyes of each of his audience. "Precisely. Because I have all the answers! But you know where that leads. Your knowledge is complete, at least as complete as human minds can fashion it. My own truth will not make you any more satisfied. The key you see is in its anticipation, not possession. I did not disappear to antagonize you, but to favor you. And the first thing you think upon seeing me is to give me a good paddling!"

"Well you're here now, hopefully for more than a minute or two?"

"As I must. After all, the universe is in great danger you know."

"You say that as if it just needed a good spring cleaning!" said Weller with rising indignation.

"I don't know", Bob replied. "Perhaps emotion would not quite fit the immense urgency. This is something beyond even your natures. In some other place, it has been remarked that the death of one is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic. I would rather not look at the death of a boundless number as some abstract mathematical possibility. But then, it won't be my personality that confronts it."

Bob surveyed his audience, smiling slyly while looking each man momentarily square in the eye. "Look gentlemen. Let's get to the point, shall we? What has your history been like these past thousand years? You have had peace, universal affection and empathy, music and arts, a triumph of human virtue and intelligence. Your society is absolutely perfect if you judge it according to human standards. But when you try to surpass it, even in the imagination, paradise becomes a trap. The others knew. They left you a thousand years ago. You've heard little since, and what you have learned is ages old. Given the expanse of space, even light speed moves at turtles pace. All you know, and the little that you know is merely the echo of history. In effect, the last five hundred years and more of their history is a blank. But now, with your new capability to vault over distance with hyper drive, you can now not only chart the history of all your race, but talk to them as well."

Fletcher turned to Weller. "And this is where you come in. Bob has given us the plans for the hyperdrive. We can build as many as we like, but somehow, in some other plane, the computing stuff which makes it work comes from this machine." He pointed to the Cronos box and then to Bob, who bowed and smiled. He continued. "You have been selected along with nineteen other captains to command a cruiser in our expeditionary force. The Gader and the Nole will be assigned to the fringe, the small worlds colonized by the dissenters. The other eighteen will go the main worlds, the Gaia system. There they will see what came of the Federated states."

"The Federation!" Weller exclaimed. "They were the nemesis of the Foundation, and they left us because they abhorred a single path. To meet with them again will be to restart history, at least the drama that until their departure made our past interesting. But the dissenters? They're a mere footnote. I can't see why you would select my ship and the Gader to visit them. After all, we represent the best in Fleet Command."

Fletcher seemed resigned. "It's not my choice. Bob wanted it. I'm not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse. But there's more. You know that we've only been able to successfully activate one Cronos machine. You see 'him' standing before you. That has changed. There will soon be another, and it will be on your ship."

Weller stood dumbfounded. "What?" he said.

Bob turned to him, smiling as always. " Don't worry, it won't be me. There will be another incarnation of Cronos for you to deal with. And it is that spirit that will accompany you to the dissenting worlds."

"I don't need help from some smart-ass machine!" Weller snapped. "This mission is nothing beyond my capabilities."

"You have no choice." Said Fletcher. "You will have a Cronos machine installed on your ship. It will have access to all your systems, just like the AI that we have resident on all Transor vessels. It will accompany on all your travels, or should I say the incarnation it chooses for itself."

"And when will I meet with this uninvited emissary."

"Now, if you choose." Said Bob. "The machine is here, at the ready. You only need give the word." He pointed to a small box in the corner.

Weller walked to it and looked down solemnly at the thing that would soon haunt his ship. The machine was a seamless metallic cube a half meter square. It was no different than the box that silently conjured Bob. And here was another, the only other, and it was to be placed on his ship, his ship. Somehow, the honor did not sit well with him. He was used to making his own decisions, taking his own chances. He did not want assistance, let alone infallible assistance. It wasn't sporting, he thought. But perhaps that wasn't just the right word. Yes, that was it, he figured. It just wasn't sport. It would all be dictated to him, the game would be lost because the game would be destroyed. He would be helpless before perfected choices as fixed and inevitable and invisible as the continuous decisions that gave him breath. The genie would escape the bottle, now remade into a dull square box. It would stand there, slim and handsome and supremely confident, and look at him with eyes jaded with infinite knowledge. Perhaps it couldn't tell him terrible things, but its existence would be terrible enough. He cringed at the thought of a future more perfecting than the perfect world he sought to escape. Now, all he could do was look on silently as the switch was turned.

Bob smiled at him, like some enticing demon. "Shall we turn it on?" he said.

All of Weller's instincts revolted at the thought of this uninvited genie. But he had no choice. After all, the 'universe' depended on it.

"Yes." He whispered. "Do your worst."

Bob merely looked at the machine, but that was enough. The machine was powered on. Their diode brightened, and then for a long moment, the room was silent. And then an apparition flashed before them, standing awkwardly before them.

The audience was astonished, dumbfounded. Suddenly Weller spoke out.

"Who the hell are you?"