The silence of the laboratory was broken only by the soft hiss of air as it circulated through the sterile, metal walls. It was a perfect vacuum of thought. The room was insulated in a quantum-stabilized alloy that regulated the temperatures and pressure conditions. A sense of dread filled the space. A permeating, invasive feeling of inevitability lingered in the very molecules of the room. It was the same atmosphere that predated any of the great battles the universe had endured. The device that stood on the table was no larger than a fist, yet it dominated the chamber. It bore intricate, interlocking parts composed of a material that bent light in ways that violated basic principles of optics and shimmered in the dim light of the room. It was a thing of beauty and horror. A nexus of thought and destruction forged by beings who had long transcended mortality. Its function was simple in concept, yet its ramifications were impossible to grasp without experiencing its horrific power firsthand.

A small holographic projection flared to life in the center of the room, showing a series of overlapping universes, swirling as a fluid connected by an invisible thread. The object twisted in a toroidal knot of compactified dimensions crawling with non-local interactions as it began to hover in power near the instrument. It was among the most terrifying of machines built by human hands, something that was an emergent property of mathematics too vast for any single mind to hold.
Pirius and Dr. Rits stood before the control interface. He could only watch as her fingers traced the haptic feedback field. Her neural implants flickered with suppressed synaptic fire, barely hiding her fear, fascination, and the cold thrill of trespassing into geometries beyond causality. The Harmonic Link shuddered in its cradle and floated a topological anomaly at the intersection of every possible worldline.
The holographic display before her was a web of Minkowski diagrams, where each strand is a universe and each intersection a choice. At the center, a single blue thread flickered, discerning ideological alignment across the shared vector of five minds bound by necessity. Aulus. Rho. Ix. Bani. Ilanga. Leaders, soldiers, and architects of survival against the Entropy-Driven Dead—a viral pattern eating its way through the multiverse’s phase space.  She exhaled. The air did not fog. The room did not permit such inefficiencies.
"Activating the Harmonic Link."
The device awoke.

Causal Collapse – Iteration 1
Aulus-prime stood on the observation deck of the K’tharn Basilica. His augmented retinas parse the fractal decay of a dying universe. Suddenly, there was a crack. A torsion in the metric of his being. His neural architecture, though hardened against quantum intrusion, flared with error codes as his consciousness unfolded. Not just here. Not just now. The Harmonic Link resonated across every eigenstate of his existence.   He turned not with his body, but with the sum of his worldlines, and was struck down.
Rho-prime, three hundred light-years away, mid-sentence in a war council, spasmed as his timeline bifurcated. The attack on Aulus’ was not a physical blow. It was an erasure of ideological coherence. And by proxy, Rho’s mind, his very idea, was excised from the manifold of existence. The effect propagated at the speed of implication.

In one universe, Rho’s body disintegrated into a quark-gluon plasma.
In another, his neural patterns inverted, collapsing into noise.
In a third, he simply ceased as his worldline was snipped clean by a causality violation.

The Harmonic Link did not discriminate. It enforced synchronization.

Ix-prime, a mathematician-queen of the Thuringian Expanse, was mid-proof when her reality folded. Her consciousness was distributed across eleven dimensions and she suffered immediate thermal death. Equations unraveled. Thought itself ceased.
Bani-prime, enshrined in the Quorum’s quantum mainframe, registered the anomaly too late. His existence was a superposition of a trillion possible states. The Harmonic Link reduced it to one: zero.  Ilanga-prime, the last of the Solarchitects, felt the collapse as a wavefront of ontological silence. His body was a construct of unstable neutronium dissolved into incoherence.
In the laboratory, Dr. Rits watched the holograms gutter and die. Names scrolled into oblivion:
AULUS – ERASED
RHO – ERASED
IX – ERASED
BANI – ERASED
ILANGA – ERASED
The Harmonic Link vibrated on as its resonance is now unopposed. It had done what it was designed to do: bind ideologies into a single, inescapable alignment. But alignment, she realized, was just another word for annihilation.  The device was not a tool. It was a law.
And laws did not care who obeyed them.  Rits felt the first tremor in her worldline. The Link was still active. Still hungry.
Somewhere, in another iteration, another version of her was already dead.

- Resplendent, Mayflower II