About 3 million years ago some bad guys got ahold of a cosmic cube and messed up a universe with it.
This also ruined the cube, so no way to fix things.

Theres this dude named SiMaN who travels around the multiverse fixing things. He happened to find
this ruined universe and figured out a way to set things right.

He knew a very special place way the heck far in the future where conditions could be made
to create a way to unruin the cube and repair the messed up universe.

This mind bogglingly difficult task was made even more difficult because the same bad guys exist
in most of the universes that would be crossed during the mission.

A path needed to be devised to get the cube from way the heck far in the future, across
thousands of universes and back 3 million years without the bad guys getting their grubby evil
hands on it - preferably without even knowing it exists.

Decoys!

Fake cosmic cubes that, if the baddys of a universe somehow got the idea that such a thing
existed and tracked it down, would find only a fancy trinket and dismiss the whole thing as
science fiction. Then, when the real cube passed thru their version of reality, they would
disregard any alerts raised by whatever instruments they may have that could concievably
detect objects of such power. 'Looked at it already. Can't fool me twice!'

But you can't just plop a cube on some remote asteroid. That would be so obvious that they would
KNOW something big was up. There has to be a real history behind it!

Enter the artists.

Thousands of beings on thousands of planets in thousands of universes. Each one making a very
close copy of the cube and the transporter containing it. And they could not have the slightest
inkling of why they really made them.

So is it just a painted steel sculpture, utterly inert save for whatever aesthetic effect it may
have on observers? Or is it a transportation device beyond our comprehension containing an
object of incalculable power?

Yes.

Klik the piks to see full size.