Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Ethan found Kaia exactly where he expected to find anyone avoiding a difficult conversation at the Citadel these days - sitting alone near the World Tree fragment, staring up at its slow-drifting leaves like they might offer better answers than she was prepared to give in person.

”You submitted an application,” Ethan said, sitting down across from her without waiting for an invitation. ”To the Deep Layer. This morning. Before you’d even finished breakfast, apparently.”

Kaia didn’t look surprised that he knew. If anything, she looked faintly relieved not to have to bring it up herself.

”Yes,” she said simply.

”Why.”

She was quiet for a moment, turning the question over carefully before answering. ”Because I’ve spent my entire life being the fourth generation of my family assigned to maintain a corridor built for a man none of us ever met. My grandmother trained me for this exact moment - finding whoever came next, delivering the message, offering the connection. And now that I’ve done it, I keep asking myself what happens to the rest of my life once the job’s finished.”

”So you want answers of your own,” Ethan said. ”Not just delivering mine.”

”Partly,” Kaia admitted. ”But mostly - Ethan, I’ve watched what this uncertainty did to my family. Four generations of people organizing their entire lives around a signal that never resolved. I don’t want a fifth generation doing the same thing. If there’s an actual answer down there, about him, about the ’S.’ designation, about any of it - I’d rather go find it myself than wait for someone else to hand it to me secondhand.”

Ethan sat with that, understanding the shape of it more than he wanted to. It wasn’t so different from his own refusal to let anyone else make decisions about his life on his behalf, just aimed in the opposite direction - toward action instead of away from it.

”The application,” he said. ”Did it go through?”

”I don’t know yet,” Kaia said. ”The Threshold Accord reviews these personally. It could take days. Could take longer. Most are denied outright.”

[NOTICE: The system would like to interject with information it has been sitting on for the past several minutes, having continued monitoring the Threshold Accord’s administrative channel throughout this conversation.]

Ethan glanced up. ”What.”

[The application was not denied.]

[It has already been approved - expedited, in fact, well outside the Accord’s normal review timeline. The system finds this unusual enough that it flagged the approval order’s metadata for closer inspection, and found something that it believes both of you should know before this goes any further.]

Kaia straightened, some of her earlier composure cracking into visible alarm. ”Approved already? That’s not possible. Nothing moves that fast through our Framework.”

[The system agrees this is anomalous. The approval was not issued by a standard reviewing body. It was issued directly by an authority designation the system recognizes from the terminal’s own archive - the same governing structure Kaia’s group referred to earlier as operating ”several levels above” the Threshold Accord’s own clearance.]

”The Origin Engine,” Ethan said slowly.

[Correct.]

”So it didn’t just approve her request,” Ethan continued, the pieces settling into place with the particular unease he’d learned to recognize whenever this story’s stakes quietly doubled without warning. ”It reached past your entire Framework to greenlight it directly.”

[That appears to be exactly what happened, yes.]

Kaia had gone pale. ”That’s never happened before. Not once, in the entire history of anyone applying for Deep Layer access. It’s always been the Threshold Accord’s decision, start to finish.”

”Until now,” Ethan said. ”Right after you happened to be the one connecting two worlds that both produced their own version of me.”

[NOTICE: The system believes this is not a coincidence. It suspects the Origin Engine has been monitoring this entire situation far more closely than anyone assumed, and that Kaia’s application simply gave it the opening it had apparently been waiting for.]

They didn’t have long to sit with the implications before the courtyard’s relative calm broke apart for the second time that week - not with a new arrival this time, but with every screen, every ambient interface, every notification surface across the entire Citadel flickering simultaneously into the same message, delivered in a formatting style Ethan hadn’t seen since the Framework’s own administrators had first shown themselves.

[NOTICE: A formal summons has been issued.]

[THE COALITION OF INSTANCE-FRAMEWORKS - a joint governing body representing every Framework currently in active contact with the recently destabilized transit network - has convened an emergency session.]

[SUBJECT DESIGNATION: ETHAN VERMA. ATTENDANCE IS REQUESTED. NOT REQUIRED. THIS DISTINCTION HAS BEEN MADE INTENTIONALLY, IN LIGHT OF THE SUBJECT’S PRIOR RESPONSES TO SIMILAR REQUESTS.]

Ethan stared at the message for a long moment, genuinely thrown by the phrasing.

”’Not required,’” he read aloud. ”That’s new. Every other governing body I’ve dealt with has led with a threat, not a disclaimer.”

[NOTICE: The system believes this careful phrasing is a direct response to the subject’s established track record - refusing every prior recruitment offer, dismantling every prior attempt at coercion, and, notably, still being the single most powerful known entity across every Instance currently in contact with this network. The Coalition appears to have learned, collectively, that demanding anything from the subject tends to produce results opposite to what was intended.]

”Smart,” Ethan admitted. ”Annoying, but smart.”

The message continued scrolling.

[SUBJECT OF SESSION: FORMAL INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE ”IDLE/AFK PROTOCOL” CURRENTLY ASSIGNED TO SUBJECT ETHAN VERMA, INCLUDING ITS CONNECTION TO THE PRECEDENT CASE DESIGNATED ”ARJUN MEHRA, FIRST IDLE KING,” AND THE RECENTLY EXPEDITED DEEP LAYER ACCESS APPROVAL GRANTED TO ENVOY KAIA SUNDARAM.]

[LOCATION: TO BE HOSTED AT THE SUBJECT’S OWN INSTANCE, GIVEN ITS CURRENT STATUS AS THE PRIMARY POINT OF CONTACT ACROSS THE DESTABILIZED NETWORK.]

[ESTIMATED ATTENDANCE: REPRESENTATIVES FROM SEVENTEEN CONFIRMED INSTANCE-FRAMEWORKS, WITH ADDITIONAL PARTIES LIKELY TO REQUEST OBSERVER STATUS.]

Ethan read that last line twice, feeling the particular, familiar dread of a man realizing his courtyard’s embassy problem was about to get dramatically, inconveniently worse.

”Seventeen,” he said. ”Seventeen Frameworks. Here. At my building.”

[NOTICE: The system estimates, based on prior diplomatic gatherings the subject has already survived, that ”additional parties requesting observer status” will likely bring the actual attendance considerably higher than seventeen.]

Kaia, still visibly shaken from the news about her own application, managed a faint, exhausted laugh despite everything. ”You wanted a quiet building full of six hundred refugees. I think that ship has officially sailed.”

”Yeah,” Ethan muttered, watching the notification finally fade from every screen around them, replaced by the ordinary evening quiet of a courtyard that had no idea it was about to host the largest interworld gathering in recorded history. ”It sailed a while ago. I’m just still catching up.”

[NOTICE: The system would like to raise two matters before the evening ends, both of which it considers time-sensitive.]

[First: the summons does not specify a date. It states only that the session will convene ”once the subject confirms attendance,” which the system interprets as the Coalition deliberately leaving the timeline in the subject’s control - another sign of how carefully they are handling this compared to prior encounters.]

[Second, and more pressing: Kaia’s approved Deep Layer access carries an expiration window. According to the approval order’s fine print, the corridor connection required to actually use that access will only remain stable for the next nine days. If she intends to go, and if the subject intends to accompany her, or send anyone in his place, that decision cannot wait for the Coalition’s session to conclude first.]

Ethan looked between the fading notification, the quiet courtyard, and Kaia’s tense, uncertain expression, and felt the shape of two decisions - one enormous, one deeply personal - settling into the same narrow window of time, each one demanding an answer he wasn’t remotely ready to give yet.