Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Seventy-two hours. The same number that had once described a shipping error was now, apparently, describing something entirely different, and Ethan spent the better part of the next two days trying very hard not to think about how unfunny that coincidence actually was.

”Any update?” he asked, for what felt like the fortieth time, standing in the vault with a cup of tea going cold in his hand while Dr. Osei’s team worked around the terminal’s base, cables and monitoring equipment strung across ancient stone in a way that felt faintly disrespectful, though nobody had said so out loud.

”Nothing new,” Osei said, not looking up from her tablet. ”The countdown hasn’t changed its estimate. Whatever it’s counting down to, it’s stable. Consistent. That’s either reassuring or deeply unsettling, and at this point I genuinely can’t tell you which.”

”Story of my life,” Ethan muttered, echoing a sentiment he’d voiced enough times over the past four months that it had started to feel like an actual personality trait rather than a passing complaint.

[NOTICE: The system would like to offer what limited reassurance it can. It has spent the last forty-eight hours attempting to determine the nature of the countdown through every available channel — the terminal’s archive, the guardians’ collective network, even direct analysis of the off-world signal itself. It has made no meaningful progress. It would like to state plainly that this is frustrating.]

”You get frustrated now,” Ethan said. ”Great. New development.”

[The system has always been capable of frustration. It simply did not always have the vocabulary to express it appropriately. It has been practicing.]

Ethan almost smiled at that, tired as he was, and set the cold tea down on the edge of the dais, glancing around the vault at the small controlled chaos of scholars documenting a countdown none of them understood. Priya stood near the passage entrance, arms crossed, keeping half an eye on the readings and half an eye on Ethan, the way she always did when something felt like it might turn dangerous without warning. Suresh had gone back to the surface an hour ago to manage the growing unease among the Citadel’s residents, most of whom had, by now, heard enough rumors about a ”countdown under the courtyard” to start asking pointed questions Ethan didn’t yet have answers for.

”Sixty hours left,” Osei reported, checking her tablet again. ”Give or take a few minutes. I wish I had better news than that, Mr. Verma.”

Ethan looked at the terminal, steady and patient as ever, its gold light pulsing at the same unhurried rhythm it had carried since the day they found it, and felt the specific, particular irritation of a man being kept waiting for information he was fairly sure the room already had and simply hadn’t decided to share yet.

”Okay,” he said, sitting back down cross-legged in front of the dais the same way he had two nights earlier. ”Let’s try this differently.”

He rested his palm flat against the terminal’s warm bronze surface, the same contact point that had unlocked every previous piece of information, and this time, instead of asking a question, he simply said what he actually wanted.

”Whatever’s coming in sixty hours,” he said, ”I’d rather see it coming than sit here guessing. Show me.”

The response was immediate, and unlike anything the terminal had offered before.

The gold light across the entire vault surged all at once, pulling inward from the walls toward the dais in slow, deliberate streams, gathering above the terminal’s surface into a shape that hadn’t existed a moment ago — a rippling, vertical pane of shimmering light, roughly door-sized, hovering in the air where empty space had been.

Osei’s team scrambled back, cameras still somehow managing to keep recording despite the general scramble. Priya’s weapon was up and ready before the light had even finished forming. Ethan, for his part, simply stayed exactly where he was, hand still on the terminal, watching the shape resolve into something unmistakably like a doorway.

[NOTICE: The system would like to state, with what composure it currently has available, that this was not something it prompted or anticipated. The terminal has just opened what appears to be a stable transit corridor — not a scan, not a projection, an actual physical opening — connecting this location to the source of the off-world signal.]

”You’re telling me,” Ethan said slowly, standing up, ”that this isn’t showing me a video. It’s opening a door.”

[That is correct.]

Through the shimmering pane, past the rippling edges of gold light, an image began to steady — not a chamber like this one, not stone or bronze, but something that looked, unmistakably, like open sky. A different sky. Duller than Earth’s, tinged faintly violet at the edges, with two small, pale moons visible even through the daylight haze, hanging low over what appeared to be the rooftops of an unfamiliar city, buildings built from materials Ethan didn’t recognize, angled in ways that felt subtly, uncannily wrong compared to anything he’d grown up around.

Nobody in the vault said anything for a long moment.

”That’s not Earth,” Priya said finally, quietly, weapon still raised but her voice carrying the particular hush of someone watching something genuinely impossible.

”No,” Ethan agreed, staring at the shimmering doorway, at the strange violet sky and its two small moons. ”No, that’s really not Earth.”

[NOTICE: The system can now confirm, with certainty, the origin of the off-world signal it detected days ago. It is coming from that location — a different Instance, entirely separate from Earth’s own apocalypse system, existing in what the terminal’s data would classify as a parallel trial-world.]

[The countdown the system detected is not measuring a threat approaching Earth. It is measuring the stability of this exact transit corridor. In approximately sixty hours, according to the readings, this connection will either stabilize permanently or collapse entirely — and the system cannot yet determine which outcome the terminal is actually working toward.]

Ethan stepped closer to the shimmering pane, close enough now to feel a faint breeze pushing through from the other side — real air, carrying a scent that was almost, but not quite, familiar, like a city he’d never visited but somehow still recognized the shape of.

”So somebody, or something, on the other end of this,” he said slowly, ”has been reaching toward us this whole time. Trying to open this.”

[That is the system’s assessment, yes.]

”Any idea who.”

[NOTICE: The system has been attempting to answer that exact question since the doorway first stabilized. It has one piece of data it can offer with reasonable confidence — a faint signature embedded in the transit corridor’s own structure, the same way the guardians recognized the mark on the Void Sword.]

[It matches.]

Ethan felt something cold settle in his chest at that, the Void Sword’s hum rising sharply against his shoulder, alert in a way it hadn’t been since the vault first opened.

”Matches what,” he said. ”Arjun’s system?”

[Not quite.]

[It matches a second signature — one the system has not encountered before, but which the terminal’s own archive flags as directly, unmistakably associated with him.]

[The system believes, though it cannot yet confirm with certainty, that whoever — or whatever — is holding this doorway open from the other side has been waiting there since Arjun Mehra first logged out of this world.]

[Which raises the one question the system genuinely cannot answer yet, and the one it suspects matters more than any other right now.]

[Is it something he left behind on purpose — or something that’s been waiting there for him to come back, without ever knowing he wasn’t going to?]