The exploration probe sped through the empty vastness of space, its primitive A.I. occasionally waking to scan its surroundings. At only twenty-three feet long, and with a diameter of six inches, the probe was nearly undetectable. There was no heat from engines to mark its position, because it had no engines. It had been launched from a catapult in orbit and traveled at 1/5 the speed of light. The probe carried a single cargo intended for a distant world so far away it would take over three-hundred thousand years to arrive. Stars were born and died as the eons passed with little to alert the A.I. out of its slumber. The leading edge of the probe became scarred in time by the passing of dust particles, but unless something managed to strike the 6 inch profile of the probe’s center mass, the minor damage caused was of no concern to the A.I. Communication with the probes home world ceased at only twenty-thousand years into its journey. The A.I. woke and checked its transmitter, and was found working as intended. The probe couldn’t know that the species that had launched it had fallen victim to a cataclysmic natural disaster and was now only scattered tribes that no longer remembered its once vast Empire. Another fifty-thousand years passed without incident as the probe continued through the darkness to its destination. The A.I. only woke once in all that time to watch a passing comet. Time continued to march on as the probe slept peacefully, but ill-fate was about to intercede. A single micro-meteorite struck a glancing blow against the nose of the probe so hard that the probe was pushed off course by three degrees. The probe calculated the new course and discovered it would miss its destination by forty light years. The mission would fail. The only hope now of any success would be if the probe accidently stumbled on a new planet to give its cargo, but luck was not going to favor the probe. The proximity sensors woke the A.I. again ten thousand years later to find itself in the path of a spacecraft so large that it defied the A.I.’s ability to even comprehend. The massive spacecraft caught the probe as deftly as a child catching a ball. The probe was taken inside the spacecraft and examined, but was found to be of no interest or value. The probe was placed into storage with only a single entry to the Captain’s Log. LOG ENTRY 20014.142 The survey team brought aboard a damaged Atan exploration probe of no interest. The probe then lay dormant inside the massive ship for two-hundred thousand years, its diminutive size lost among so many other artifacts, until the current Captain of the alien ship had begun pouring through the daunting storage of Ship Logs, looking for anything that might help two castaway children he’d taken in as wards of the ship. The Captain had skimmed over the entry, but came back to it as something occurred to him – the entry’s star date was one-hundred and fifty thousand years after the fall of the Atan civilization. The Atan had been facing a looming natural disaster that would destroy their home world, and all their colonies. The Danus and Thorus Galaxies were colliding, and with the collision, all the Atan occupied solar systems would be ripped apart. The Atan had waited too long and evacuation was no longer possible by normal means, so they had launched millions of low-tech exploration probes; each with a single Atan Jump Gate aboard in the hope that some of them would find suitable worlds in distant galaxies. Despite the Aeden’s claim of inventing Jump Gate technology, it had been the Atan that invented the technology many millennia earlier and shared it with the Aeden. Though, the Aeden had not yet managed to build a Jump Gate with the same grace, artistry, skill, and nearly unlimited range of the Atan Jump Gates. Of course the Ruk had no interest in Jump Gate technology and tossed the probe into storage on Deck Zero without a further thought and forgotten. The Captain made an educated guess as to which section of Deck Zero the probe might have been stored. He could send a thousand people down to Deck Zero and likely not find anything; the place was a hopeless maze. He’d drawn a map of the area he thought the artifact might be in, placed an X on the map, and given the map to Jack. It would give the boy something to occupy himself with, everyone loved a treasure hunt. What the Captain had failed to understand was the intensity that Jack put into everything he did, or that Jack was not from a culture that slow-sleep cycles were normal. To the Ruk, a 35 year slow-sleep was no different than going to sleep tonight and waking up in the morning. When the Captain went into his slow-sleep cycle, one of the other Captains would come out of their slow-sleep cycle and command the ship for several years before returning to slow-sleep and passing command of the ship to the next Captain just coming out of his cycle. In this manner, a Ruk’s lifespan, relatively speaking, could easy span ten-thousand years or more. But for Jack, a 35 year slow-sleep cycle was a death sentence. The Captain had inadvertently set a series of events into motion that would ripple across the universe.