Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The sky turned blue at 3:47 PM on a Tuesday, which was strange, because it had already been blue since morning.

Ethan Verma didn’t notice. He was too busy losing to a boss he’d already beaten twice, headphones jammed over his ears, curtains taped shut against the sunlight because sunlight was the enemy of a good gaming session. His room smelled like instant noodles and unwashed laundry, and the only light came from a monitor that hadn’t been dusted since the console launched.

Outside, the actual sky — the one nobody in his building was looking at because everyone was busy with their own lives — split down the middle like a cracked screen protector. A deep, oceanic blue bled across the atmosphere, thick and glossy, the exact color of a loading bar.

Then it turned red.

Not sunset red. Not ”storm’s coming” red. This was the red of a health bar dropping to zero. The red of a warning nobody asked for.

Ethan’s character died on screen. He tossed the controller onto the bed and reached blindly for his last bag of chips, found it empty, and groaned like a man personally betrayed by the universe.

”Seriously?”

That was the extent of his reaction to the actual apocalypse. An empty chip bag.

Three floors down, someone screamed. Ethan heard it, vaguely, the way you hear a car alarm two streets over — present, irritating, none of his business. He was busy negotiating with an empty snack drawer.

The scream multiplied. Then it wasn’t one voice, it was dozens, then it wasn’t screaming, it was roaring — a low, wet, guttural sound that didn’t belong to any human throat Ethan had ever heard, and he’d sat through some genuinely unhinged group chats.

He paused.

Not out of fear. Out of the specific irritation of a man whose peace has been disturbed.

”Are they filming something?” he muttered, peeling off one earbud.

That was when the world in front of him — his actual, physical bedroom wall, the one with the poster peeling at the corner — flickered like a monitor losing signal. A translucent blue pane of light unfolded in the air, hovering a foot from his face, humming faintly like old electronics.

Ethan stared at it the way most people stare at a very confusing parking ticket.

[SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]

[GLOBAL EVENT: THE VEIL HAS BROKEN]

[EARTH HAS BEEN CONVERTED INTO SURVIVAL PARAMETERS]

[ALL LIFEFORMS WILL BE ASSIGNED A CLASSIFICATION]

”Okay,” Ethan said slowly, to no one. ”Either I’m having a stroke, or my landlord finally installed the smart-home upgrade he’s been promising for two years.”

The window kept scrolling. Outside, the roaring got louder. Something crashed against a wall hard enough that plaster dust sifted down from his ceiling.

[SCANNING USER...]

[USER DETECTED: ETHAN VERMA]

[ASSIGNING CLASS...]

[ERROR]

[ERROR]

[ERROR]

[CLASS ASSIGNMENT FAILED — DEFAULTING TO: (UNEMPLOYED)]

Ethan blinked at that one twice.

”Rude,” he said. ”I have a job. I review indie games on my blog. Six followers, but still.”

The panel didn’t seem to care about his feelings. It kept unspooling text like it had been waiting years to say all this and finally got the chance.

[SYSTEM TYPE DETECTED: IDLE/AFK PROTOCOL — LEGACY BUILD]

[WARNING: THIS SYSTEM CLASS IS DEPRECATED]

[WARNING: THIS SYSTEM CLASS SHOULD NOT EXIST]

[WARNING: PLEASE CONTACT SUPPORT]

[SUPPORT UNAVAILABLE]

[PROCEEDING ANYWAY]

There was something almost apologetic about the way it flickered, like even the system itself thought this was a mistake. Ethan had a strange, sinking feeling he understood exactly how it felt.

Downstairs, glass shattered. A woman shrieked something about teeth, plural, a lot of them, and Ethan finally — finally — got up off the bed and walked to his window. He peeled back the tape holding the curtain shut and looked down at the street below.

The world had, in fact, ended.

The street he’d lived on his entire life — the one with the tea stall on the corner and the stray dog that always slept under the parked scooters — was gone. In its place was something out of the worst horror mod he’d ever downloaded: cracked asphalt bleeding red light from the seams, cars flipped and smoking, and things — genuinely, unmistakably things — dragging themselves out of a fissure that hadn’t existed twenty minutes ago. Grey-skinned, too many joints, moving in that jerky, wrong way that told his lizard brain to run before his conscious brain even processed what he was looking at.

People were fighting them with kitchen knives. With cricket bats. With chairs.

One man swung a broken wooden leg from a table at something the size of a refrigerator and got flung through a shop window for his trouble.

Ethan watched for exactly four seconds, absorbed the full horror of the situation, and then did the single most Ethan thing possible.

He closed the curtain.

”Yeah, no,” he said. ”That’s a tomorrow problem.”

The system panel, patient as ever, kept scrolling beside his head like it hadn’t just watched him dismiss the end of civilization with the same energy he used to dismiss telemarketers.

[HOSTILE ENTITIES DETECTED WITHIN 200M]

[THREAT LEVEL: MODERATE]

[RECOMMENDATION: ENGAGE OR EVACUATE]

[USER STATUS: LYING DOWN]

”Correct,” Ethan said, flopping back onto his bed. ”Excellent read.”

He genuinely wasn’t being brave. He wasn’t some secret hardened badass hiding behind a lazy exterior, calmly calculating odds. He was, in the most literal sense, a nineteen-year-old who had spent the last six hours awake, the last three days mostly indoors, and who currently possessed zero chips, zero motivation, and a growing suspicion that whatever was happening outside was simply too much effort to deal with directly.

Also — and this was the part that actually mattered, even if he wouldn’t have admitted it — some deep, dumb, animal part of his brain had clocked the system window humming quietly next to his pillow and decided, with total and unearned confidence, that thing’s got my back.

He had no evidence for this. He just felt it. The way you feel like your phone will survive one more drop even though it definitely won’t.

[IDLE/AFK PROTOCOL ACTIVE]

[SYSTEM WILL CONTINUE OPERATING WHILE USER IS INACTIVE]

[GENERATING AVATAR...]

[AVATAR GENERATED]

[AVATAR WILL AUTOMATICALLY ENGAGE THREATS AND FARM PROGRESSION]

[NO USER ACTION REQUIRED]

[USER MAY CONTINUE CURRENT ACTIVITY]

Ethan read that line three times.

”No user action required,” he repeated slowly, like a man discovering the good kind of loophole. ”So... I can just. Not.”

He stared at the ceiling. Somewhere below, glass kept breaking. Somewhere further off, a building groaned and came down in a roar of dust and screaming. The world was ending in real time, in high definition, in surround sound.

And the system, glitchy, broken, deprecated, apologizing to nobody, kept humming beside his bed like it had made peace with its one very strange, very unmotivated user.

Ethan reached over, grabbed his phone, saw it had zero signal, tossed it aside, and pulled his blanket up over his shoulder.

”Wake me up,” he told the ceiling, or the system, or the universe in general, ”when there’s food.”

[REQUEST LOGGED]

[REQUEST: LOW PRIORITY]

[REQUEST: WILL BE FULFILLED EVENTUALLY]

He was asleep in four minutes.

Outside room 404, the world burned, screamed, and rebuilt itself into something no human alive fully understood yet. Inside room 404, the strongest being on the entire planet was drooling slightly onto a pillow shaped like a cartoon cat, blissfully unaware that his personal, glitchy, deprecated system had just quietly begun grinding through the end of the world on his behalf.

Somewhere, in a place made of pure light and math that didn’t belong to any human language, several old and very powerful systems noticed the anomaly.

They chose, for now, to say nothing.

That would not last.