The screech of burning rubber was the last thing Alex heard before the world turned into a kaleidoscope of twisted metal and shattering glass. At twenty-four, his life was a stagnant loop of refreshing job boards and staring at a ceiling fan, but in that final second, instinct had overridden apathy. He had seen the school bus—filled with oblivious, laughing children—and the massive tanker truck veering wildly across the center line, driven by a man lost to a bourbon haze. Alex didn't think; he just floored it. His beat-up sedan became a sacrificial wedge, slamming into the truck's front axle and forcing it into a ditch just inches away from the bus's yellow bumper. Then, there was only the smell of gasoline, a sudden, searing heat, and a silence so profound it felt heavy.
Alex expected the "light at the end of the tunnel" or perhaps the sudden heat of a different destination, but instead, he found himself in a sensory vacuum. It was a void of absolute nothingness—no sound, no light, no passage of time. For what felt like an eternity, he floated. He tried to scream, but he had no lungs; he tried to move, but he had no limbs. He was merely a spark of consciousness drifting in an infinite, ink-black ocean. Loneliness turned to boredom, boredom to madness, and madness eventually settled into a cold, crystalline clarity. He counted the "seconds" until he reached billions. By his estimation, a thousand years had bled away in that hollow silence before the darkness finally cracked.
The void didn't just light up; it dissolved. In its place stood a being that defied every visual law of physics. It was a shifting tapestry of constellations, geometric fractals, and eyes that saw through the dimensions of time. This was @#₹!%*!@#% (the Supreme God), the ultimate arbiter of the All. The being didn't speak with a voice, but with a conceptual vibration that rattled Alex's very soul. "An error," the vibration echoed, tinged with a cosmic sigh. "A lesser deity, distracted by a passing supernova, prematurely cut your thread. You were meant to live, Alex. You were meant to thrive. To compensate for a millennium in the Nothing, I grant you a boon. Three wishes to shape your path forward. Speak, and the law of existence shall bend."
Alex didn't rush. A thousand years of silence had taught him the value of a measured response. He looked at the Supreme Being, his phantom eyes narrowing. He thought of the worlds he had read about in his unemployed days—the stories that were more real to him than his own drab life. He didn't want a "second chance" at a normal life; he wanted the keys to the kingdom. "Let's go all or nothing" Alex replied, his mental voice steady despite the overwhelming presence before him. He laid out his demands with the precision of a man who had spent ten centuries dreaming of this exact moment: travel to every fictional world, the unparalleled intellect of the multiverse's greatest scientist, and a sovereign space to hold his power.