Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Suresh’s prediction proved conservative. By the third morning, the crowd outside the building had swelled past four hundred, spilling from the courtyard into the street beyond the sanctuary boundary, a growing sprawl of makeshift tents and salvaged bedding that had started to look less like a temporary shelter and more like a permanent settlement in the making.

Ethan woke to find a line forming outside his apartment door.

He opened it, still half-asleep, to discover roughly a dozen people waiting patiently in the hallway, each one holding some version of a request — a dispute over courtyard space, a question about food rationing, a formal petition regarding whether pets were allowed inside the shield’s boundary, submitted by a man clutching a nervous, twitchy cat like his life depended on the answer.

”No,” Ethan said to the first person in line, closing the door again before anyone could elaborate on their question.

Suresh found him twenty minutes later, still in bed, phone propped against his pillow, deliberately ignoring the continued knocking from downstairs.

”Beta, you cannot simply hide from this,” Suresh said, not unkindly, sitting on the edge of Ethan’s cluttered desk chair. ”You have four hundred people living in and around your building now. They look to you. Someone needs to set expectations, or it will fall apart into chaos within a week.”

Ethan groaned into his pillow. ”I don’t want to run a settlement, Suresh. I wanted quiet. That’s it. That was the whole goal.”

”Then set the terms that get you quiet,” Suresh said, with the patient logic of a man who’d clearly given this some thought already. ”You don’t have to manage every dispute personally. Give me the authority to handle daily matters — I am already doing most of it anyway. But you, beta, need to establish the actual rules. The things that matter to you. People will follow them, because they understand exactly what they owe you for this.”

Ethan considered that for a long moment, staring at his ceiling, weighing the appeal of continued avoidance against the reality that ignoring the problem clearly wasn’t making the line outside his door any shorter.

”Fine,” he said finally, sitting up with the specific reluctance of a man conceding a point he didn’t want to concede. ”Get everyone together. Courtyard, this afternoon. I’ll say something.”

The courtyard, by the time Ethan made his way down that afternoon, held more people than he’d fully processed until he actually stood in front of them — easily three hundred faces turned toward him, packed shoulder to shoulder in the space that had once held nothing but a rusted swing set and, briefly, a mountain of discarded legendary loot.

He climbed onto an overturned crate someone had set up, mostly because Suresh had insisted he needed some kind of elevated platform to be properly seen, and looked out at the crowd with the distinct discomfort of a man who genuinely hated public speaking and had never once in his life imagined he’d be doing it under these particular circumstances.

”Okay,” he said, and the courtyard went almost immediately silent, three hundred people leaning in to catch every word. ”So, uh. I hear there’s been some questions. About rules, and stuff. I’m gonna keep this short, because honestly I didn’t plan a speech.”

A few nervous laughs rippled through the crowd. Ethan took that as encouragement and pressed on.

”You can stay. All of you, for as long as you need. I’m not gonna charge rent, I’m not gonna ask for payment, I don’t really need anything most of you have anyway.” He paused, scanning the crowd, and found the words settling into something a little more genuine than he’d expected. ”This building’s safe now. I made sure of that. I want it to stay that way, and honestly, I want it to stay quiet. That’s the actual point of all this, if I’m being fully honest with you.”

Someone near the front raised a hand tentatively. ”What are the rules, exactly?”

”Right, rules.” Ethan counted them off on his fingers, mostly making them up as he went, though they felt, even to him, like the correct instinct as he said them out loud. ”One — no fighting. I don’t care what the disagreement’s about, you don’t solve it with fists or weapons in here. If something’s serious enough that you actually need that, take it outside the shield, because I’m not interested in refereeing.” A murmur of agreement moved through the crowd. ”Two — nobody goes hungry if we’ve got food to share. If you’ve got extra, share it. If you don’t have enough, ask, and someone will sort you out. I’ve got — ” he hesitated, thinking of the void inventory’s endless stockpile, ”—I’ve got plenty, honestly. Nobody needs to hoard here.”

”Three,” he continued, warming to it now despite himself, ”keep the noise down after dark. I sleep a lot, and I sleep hard, and I would really, genuinely appreciate not being woken up by arguments or crying babies at three in the morning. Reasonable daytime noise is fine. I’m not asking for silence twenty-four hours a day. Just — respect that some of us are trying to actually rest in here, probably for the first time in weeks.”

A ripple of understanding laughter moved through the crowd this time — the specific, warm laughter of people who recognized, in Ethan’s oddly personal priorities, something that felt more honest than any formal decree a proper leader might have delivered.

”Four,” Ethan said, and this one came out a little quieter, a little more sincere than the others, ”look out for each other. I can keep the monsters out. I can’t be everywhere making sure people are being decent to their neighbors. That part’s on you.”

He paused, glancing at Suresh, who gave him an encouraging nod from the edge of the crowd.

”That’s basically it,” Ethan finished, already feeling the itch to get down off the crate and go find something to eat. ”Suresh handles the day-to-day stuff — space allocation, disputes, all that. Go to him for anything that’s not, like, an actual emergency. I’m not trying to run this place. I just want to live here and have it be peaceful. That’s the whole deal.”

He hopped down off the crate before anyone could raise a follow-up question, and the crowd, rather than dispersing with the usual restless murmur of unresolved concerns, instead broke into something closer to quiet, grateful applause — not loud, not overwhelming, but genuine, the sound of several hundred people who’d spent weeks with nothing but fear and uncertainty finally hearing something that sounded, however unpolished, like a promise they could actually trust.

By that evening, a hand-painted sign had appeared near the courtyard entrance, clearly Suresh’s handiwork, listing the rules Ethan had rattled off that afternoon in slightly cleaner, more organized language, with one addition scrawled at the bottom that Ethan hadn’t personally authorized but couldn’t quite bring himself to object to either:

THE RULES OF ROOM 404

1. No fighting inside the shield.

2. Share food if you have extra.

3. Quiet after dark — the Guardian sleeps.

4. Look after your neighbors.

Violators will be asked to leave. Repeat violators will answer to Suresh.

Ethan read it on his way back up to his apartment, snorted at ”the Guardian sleeps,” and decided, on balance, it was an accurate enough summary of his priorities that he didn’t feel the need to correct it.

He climbed the stairs to Room 404, let himself in, and collapsed onto his bed with the particular satisfaction of a man who’d just accidentally founded a functioning micro-society purely by explaining, out loud, exactly how he liked his afternoons to go.

Below him, in a courtyard that had transformed from empty concrete into something resembling a genuine, hopeful community, three hundred people settled in for the first properly organized, properly peaceful night since the world had ended — bound together not by any grand declaration of leadership, but by four simple rules and one deeply, sincerely lazy teenager’s uncomplicated desire for a good night’s sleep.