Cease

For a long time, there was nothing. The prime numbers pulsed, the music clashed, and Kenji’s incessant question echoed into the void. It was, Silas admitted, deeply, profoundly annoying. He wasn’t sure if he was more impressed by Kenji’s ingenuity or horrified by his pettiness.

Then, the universe flinched. Not a physical jolt, but a subtle, sickening lurch in the fabric of reality. The discordant music resolved into a single, pure tone, a note of such perfect resonance that it threatened to shake their very atoms apart. The prime numbers stopped, the sequence frozen on a number so large it had no name.

And then, a new message, projected not into their minds, but onto the viewscreen of the Tesseract, written in a language they had never seen but understood instinctively. It was a language of pure mathematics, of elegant, irrefutable logic.

And it said, simply: ‘Cease.’

Kenji smiled. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we have its attention.’