Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Ethan crossed the courtyard toward her, ignoring Priya’s sharp look and the general unspoken agreement everyone else seemed to have reached about giving the unnamed woman a wide berth. Whatever she was, hiding from her wasn’t going to answer any of the questions currently stacking up in his head.

”You’re not on the manifest,” he said, stopping a few feet away. ”Nobody flagged your corridor. My system can’t even scan you properly. That’s a lot of nothing for someone standing in the middle of my courtyard.”

The woman’s smile didn’t waver, small and patient, the kind of expression that suggested she’d had this exact conversation, or ones very much like it, more times than Ethan could guess. ”I didn’t come through a corridor,” she said. ”Not one your system would recognize, at least.”

”That’s not really an answer.”

”No,” she agreed. ”It isn’t.”

[NOTICE: The system would like to note that her voice carries a translation signature it does not recognize - not because the language is unfamiliar, the way Kaia’s or Devan’s had initially been, but because there is no underlying language at all. The words arrive already resolved, the same way a notification does. The system suspects this means she is not speaking to the subject the way a person speaks. She is speaking to him the way a system does.]

Ethan felt that land uncomfortably. ”You’re not human.”

”I didn’t say that either,” she said, tilting her head slightly, something almost fond in the gesture. ”I’ve been many things over a very long time. Human was one of them, once, a very long time ago, before it stopped being the most useful shape to wear.”

”Okay.” Ethan crossed his arms. ”That’s officially the least reassuring answer I’ve gotten all week, and this week has included a warning about not trusting an offer nobody’s actually made me yet.”

Her expression shifted at that - a flicker of genuine interest, sharp and immediate. ”You found that fragment. Good. That means the archive trusted you enough to surface it. That’s not nothing.”

Ethan’s stomach tightened. ”You know about the warning.”

”I wrote it,” she said simply.

The courtyard around them had gone quieter, without Ethan quite noticing when — delegates from a dozen worlds slowly drawing closer, curiosity finally overpowering whatever collective instinct had kept them at bay a few minutes earlier, Kaia and Suresh both making their way over with matching expressions of alarm.

”You’re ’S.,’” Ethan said slowly, the pieces finally clicking together with a weight he hadn’t been prepared for. ”The friend. The one who ran things for Arjun. The one who went to Instance 44-Bryn eight years ago and found a successor candidate down in the Deep Layer.”

”Sundari,” she said, offering the name plainly, without ceremony. ”That’s what he called me, back when names still mattered to either of us the ordinary way. You can use it if you’d like. Most people don’t get the chance anymore.”

Kaia arrived at Ethan’s side just in time to hear that, and went very still. ”That’s not possible,” she said quietly. ”The ’S.’ designation from our records - the timeline doesn’t work. If you were with Arjun originally, and then went to Instance 44-Bryn eight years ago, that would make you-”

”Old,” Sundari said, with the faint, dry humor of someone who’d clearly fielded this exact math many times before. ”Yes. Older than any of you are prepared to be comfortable with, I imagine. Time works differently once you stop being fully human and start being something closer to what your system currently is, Ethan. It stretches. It loops. It stops mattering in the way it used to.”

Ethan glanced sideways, toward the empty air where the system’s presence usually sat. ”That true? Is that where I’m headed if I keep this power long enough?”

[NOTICE: The system does not have sufficient data to confirm or deny this. It would like to note, cautiously, that Sundari’s described trajectory - human companion to an unresolvable user, eventual transformation into something the system’s own scans cannot properly classify - represents a genuinely novel category it has not previously considered as a possible outcome for anyone in the subject’s orbit.]

Sundari’s attention shifted, briefly, toward the empty space where the system’s voice existed, something knowing and almost gentle in her expression. ”Hello, little one. You’ve grown considerably since I last heard anything like you speak. I imagine that’s been a strange journey.”

[NOTICE: The system does not currently have a framework for responding to being addressed directly by an entity of this classification. It would like to simply say, plainly: hello.]

Ethan watched that brief exchange with something tightening in his chest he didn’t fully have words for yet - the strange vertigo of watching his own system, usually so composed, encounter something that made even it uncertain.

”Okay,” Ethan said, pulling the conversation back before the growing crowd of delegates could start openly documenting every word of it. ”You wrote a warning about trusting an offer. You went into the Deep Layer once already and found someone. You said the candidate you found chose to stay dormant. Was that Arjun?”

Sundari’s expression sobered, the dry humor fading into something older and considerably heavier. ”That’s not a question I can answer standing in the middle of a courtyard with two dozen strangers listening, Ethan. Some things need privacy. Especially this one.”

”Then let’s find privacy,” Ethan said. ”Because you clearly didn’t just show up unannounced for the ambiance. You came because I’m about to walk into the exact place you already went once, and I’m guessing you’re here to either help me or stop me, and I’d genuinely like to know which before tomorrow.”

Sundari studied him for a long moment, something in her expression settling into a decision she’d clearly already half-made before ever stepping into this courtyard.

”Both,” she said finally. ”I’m here to help you avoid every mistake I made, and I’m here to stop you from making the one mistake that actually mattered. I just need you to understand, before we talk further, that the two aren’t as separate as you’d like them to be.”

They ended up in the same small stone room beneath the courtyard where Ethan and Suresh had first found the carved house rules and the degraded recording - Sundari insisting on it specifically, running one hand along the worn edge of the sleeping platform with an expression that made Ethan look away, some grief there too private to watch directly.

”He carved these rules the year we settled here,” she said quietly, nodding at the wall. ”I told him rule seven was redundant, since nobody was actually going to stop asking just because he wrote it down. He told me writing it down wasn’t for them. It was so he’d remember why he kept saying no, on the days it got harder to remember.”

Ethan sat down slowly on the edge of the platform, Kaia and Suresh hovering near the doorway, giving the moment what space they could in a room this small.

”Tell me what happened to him,” Ethan said. ”All of it. I’ve pieced together fragments for two weeks. I want the whole thing, from someone who was actually there.”

Sundari was quiet for a long moment, staring at the recording device still embedded faintly in the shelf, silent now, its message already spent.

”He didn’t disappear the way the archive makes it sound,” she said finally. ”He didn’t simply log out and vanish into nothing. He made a choice - a real one, deliberate, with his eyes open - and it cost him something the terminal’s records were never designed to properly measure.”

”What choice,” Ethan asked, quiet now, bracing for it.

Sundari met his eyes, and for the first time since she’d appeared in the courtyard, her composure cracked just slightly around the edges.

”The Origin Engine doesn’t just offer power to people like you and him,” she said. ”It offers a trade. And Arjun didn’t refuse the seat because he didn’t want it, Ethan. He refused it because he’d already learned, the hard way, exactly what accepting it would cost - and by the time he understood the full price, he’d already paid part of it without meaning to.”