I died on a Tuesday, which felt disrespectful.
There was no tunnel of light and no flashing of my life before my eyes. I was standing in a convenience store at 11:40 at night, arguing with a vending machine that had eaten my dollar, when the left side of my head filled with white noise and the floor came up to meet me. The last thing I remember is the hum of the refrigerators and a thought so stupid it still embarrasses me.
Seriously? Over a dollar?
Then nothing. Not darkness, because darkness implies something is there to be dark. Just a pause, like the universe had hit the button on me and gone to make a sandwich.
When I came back, I was standing on a floor that wasn't a floor.
It looked like a floor in the sense that my feet weren't falling, but it was the color of a sunrise that couldn't commit, shifting from gold to rose to a pale blue I don't have a word for. There were no walls and no ceiling, just soft light in every direction and a faint sound like a choir humming in another room.
"Ah. There you are. Sit, sit."
I turned around. There was a chair behind me that hadn't been there a second ago, a comfortable-looking armchair, and across from it sat a man.
I use the word man generously. He looked like a man, in the way a drawing of a person looks like a person. He had a kind, forgettable face that somehow kept rearranging itself whenever I tried to focus on it. One moment he was an old man with a white beard, the next a young woman with sharp eyes, then a middle-aged guy who looked like he sold insurance. The only constant was the smile, warm and bright and a little too delighted, like someone who had been waiting a long time for a good show to start.
"You're dead," he said cheerfully.
"Yeah," I said. "I figured that one out."
"Aneurysm. Very sudden. You felt almost nothing."
"I felt irritated at a vending machine."
"Yes, that's the 'almost.'" He waved a hand. "Don't worry about it. It was a very small dollar."
I sat down, mostly because my legs suggested it. The armchair was the most comfortable thing I had ever touched, which I took as a bad sign. Nobody gives you good furniture before delivering good news.
"So you're God," I said.
"A god. The god. Close enough for most people." He shrugged. "The title varies by region."
"And I'm going to... what, get judged? Heaven? Hell?"
"Oh, no, nothing like that. You were a perfectly decent person. You paid your taxes, called your mother on Sundays, and once returned a wallet with all the cash still in it." He paused. "You also spent roughly eleven thousand hours of your life watching cartoons, which, honestly, I respect."
I let that go. "Then why am I here?"
His smile widened.
"Because I'm bored," he said, "and you're interesting."
I waited for the rest of that sentence. It did not come.
"That's it?"
"That's it. Do you know how many people die every second? And how few of them die wishing for something specific? You, my friend, spent your final conscious thought on a vending machine, but the thought before that, the real one, the one you've been carrying around for years..." He leaned forward. "You wished you'd had more time. More time to get good at things. To be ready for the moments that matter. You always felt like life kept handing you the exam before you'd finished studying."
My throat went tight. I hadn't said that to anyone. I'm not sure I had said it to myself.
"So here's my offer," he continued, sitting back. "A second life, in a world of your choosing. Well, of my choosing, but I have a feeling you'll like it. Do you recognize this?"
He snapped his fingers.
The air in front of me unfolded into an image, a boy in a green jacket with messy brown hair, standing on a hilltop with a grin that said he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. On his wrist sat a chunky black-and-white device with a glowing green dial.
I stopped breathing.
"That's..."
"Ben Tennyson," said God. "Ten years old. Lazy, loud, kind of a coward, and entirely unprepared for the most powerful piece of technology in the known universe to fall out of the sky and attach itself to him." He tilted his head. "Would you like to be him?"
I don't remember deciding to say yes. I just remember the word being out of my mouth before I had finished thinking, and the way God's laughter bubbled up like I had passed some test.
"Wonderful! Now, the good part." He held up three fingers. "Three wishes. Not wishes, technically. Adjustments. Think of them as the settings menu. Ask for anything within reason, and I will define 'reason' very, very generously."
My mind went white and blank for about four seconds. Then I thought about Ben. I thought about what I knew: Vilgax, who had crossed galaxies for a single watch. The Forever Knights, Dr. Animo, the Highbreed, and all the things waiting out there in the dark. And a ten-year-old kid who survived because of luck, heart, and a watch that kept him alive despite himself.
I didn't want to survive on luck. I wanted to be ready.
"First wish," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I want the body of the ultimate human. Not just strong. Perfect. Perfect genetic optimization. Physical potential with no ceiling. A body that recovers from damage almost instantly, so I can train harder than anyone ever has, without limits."
God nodded slowly. "Go on."
"And the mind to go with it. Galvan-level intellect, like Azmuth. Built into my own brain, seamlessly. Perfect recall. Processing speed that makes my old brain look like dial-up. The ability to understand a concept the moment it's explained." I swallowed. "I don't want to just use the Omnitrix. I want to understand it."
"Hm." God steepled his fingers. "That's a lot of brain to cram into a ten-year-old's skull."
"I'm sure you'll manage."
He barked out a laugh. "Oh, I like you. Granted." He made a small gesture, like adjusting a dial, and for a moment I felt something like warm static run from the base of my spine to the crown of my head. It wasn't painful. It was more like standing in front of a window and having someone pull back the curtains. "Next?"
I took a breath.
"The second wish. I want my Anodite spark fully awakened. Absolute mastery over mana."
For the first time, God's eyebrows rose.
"Gwen's the one with the Anodite heritage," I said quickly. "Verdona's bloodline. I know that. But Ben's grandmother is the same woman. The potential's in the family, buried somewhere. I want it awake, and I want to be able to use it as naturally as breathing. Not a trickle. Not a spark that flickers. I want to be the kind of Anodite that even Verdona would call terrifying."
"Because?"
"Because the Omnitrix gives me aliens," I said. "But mana gives me me. If the watch gets taken, if I'm cut off, or if I'm in a situation where I can't transform, I still have something that can't be stolen."
The warm static ran through me again, only this time it didn't stop at my skin. It sank deeper, into something that felt like a pilot light I hadn't known I'd been carrying. A small, pink-violet warmth, curled up somewhere under my ribs, waiting for me to ask it to wake up.
"Granted," said God softly. And then, with his smile widening: "You know, you're the first one to ask for that. Usually they stop at the strength."
"I'm not interested in usually."
"No," he said. "I can tell."
He sat back, tapping one finger against the arm of his chair, and I realized this was the part where I was supposed to choose carefully. A third wish was the last chance I'd get. Power, wealth, a harem, some magic item or loophole. I'd read enough stories to know what people usually asked for.
But I'd already thought about this one. I had thought about it the instant he'd said Ben Tennyson, ten years old.
"Third wish," I said. "The timeline. I want the story to start when Ben is sixteen. Not ten."
God went very still.
"The Omnitrix," I said. "The camping trip, the meteor, all of it. I want it to happen six years from now. I wake up as a kid. I get six years to train, to study, to grow into everything you just gave me. Then, when the watch lands, I'm not a ten-year-old with a toy. I'm ready."
For a long moment, nothing moved. The choir in the distance had gone quiet.
Then God started to laugh.
It wasn't the polite, amused chuckle from before. This was the real thing, huge and unrestrained, the kind of laughter that shakes your whole body and makes you wipe your eyes. It rolled out across the endless sunrise floor like thunder, and I felt it in my bones.
"Six years," he wheezed. "He asks for six years! Oh, this is going to be wonderful. Do you know how many people in your position ask for a harem? A hundred and four. Do you know how many ask for a study period?"
"Is that a... no?"
"One. You." He wiped his eyes, still grinning. "Oh, things are going to get so interesting."
"Wait, what do you mean, interesting? Is something going to go wrong? Are there side effects? Do I need to know anything about—"
"Granted," said God, and snapped his fingers.
Somewhere, very far away, I heard a bell.
It was a flat, clanging, school-hallway bell, absurdly out of place in the middle of eternity. The sunrise colors began to bleed together. The armchair dissolved under me. God's face blurred, shifted, settled into something that might have been a young man with kind eyes, and he lifted one hand in a lazy wave.
"Good luck, Ben Tennyson. Make it count."
The light swallowed everything.
RRRRRIIIIINNNNGGGG.
My eyes snapped open.
The first thing I noticed was the noise. Chairs scraping. Backpacks unzipping. A wave of high-pitched voices all talking at once, and under it all the smell of dry-erase markers and old carpet and floor cleaner. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
The second thing I noticed was my hands.
They were small. Smaller than I remembered them being, with scabbed knuckles and a bandage on one thumb. I turned them over slowly. Ten-year-old hands. They were mine, and they looked wrong and perfect at the same time.
I was sitting at a desk. A school desk, the old kind with the attached chair and a scratched-up top where someone had carved a lopsided smiley face. On the wall in front of me hung a poster of the solar system, and below it, a whiteboard.
A woman stood at the front of the room, her gray cardigan slightly rumpled, a stack of papers clutched against her chest. She had the tired, genuine smile of a teacher on the last day of the school year.
"All right, everyone," she called over the chaos. "That's the final bell! Have a wonderful summer. Read a book. Wear sunscreen. And Ben Tennyson, I'd better not hear that you spent the entire break playing video games."
A few kids snickered. I felt my face move into a grin without any instruction from me, an automatic, easy, lazy grin.
"No promises, Mrs. Hadley," I heard myself say.
My voice. It was high, cracked at the edges, and unmistakably a kid's. But it was mine in a way I couldn't explain, and I knew, with a flash of cold wonder, that this body had said that exact line a thousand times before.
The kids filed out, laughing, shoving each other toward the door. Someone's lunchbox swung and banged against my desk. A boy I half-recognized, and a girl who was probably in the show for exactly two seconds, bumped past me, shouting something about a pool party. The room emptied in a rolling wave of noise and sunlight, and I sat there and watched them go, my heart hammering against ribs that suddenly felt too small.
I closed my eyes.
And the world opened.
It was like someone had flipped a switch in my skull. Every sound in the room became distinct: the squeak of sneakers, the drip of a faucet down the hall, the hum of the ceiling fan, each one cataloged and sorted without effort. I could feel my own heartbeat in my fingertips. I could remember, perfectly, every word of the conversation I'd just had in a place outside of time. Every frame. Every inflection of God's laughter.
And deeper, beneath all of it, something warm stirred in my chest, a small, bright, pink-violet ember that responded to my attention the way a cat responds to a hand. I didn't know how to reach for it yet. But it was there.
Mana.
I opened my eyes.
The room was empty now. Mrs. Hadley had turned to erase the board, humming to herself. Sunlight slanted through the windows, golden and thick with dust. Outside, a bus rumbled by.
I looked down at my small, scabbed hands, then up at the calendar pinned beside the door. June. The last week of fifth grade.
I did the math, and it took me no time at all. My brain had stopped feeling like a brain and started feeling like a machine.
The Omnitrix landed when Ben was ten. That was the original timeline.
But I'd asked for sixteen.
Six years. Six years before the meteor. Six years before the camping trip, before Grandpa Max's old RV rattled down a dark road and a strange green light fell out of the sky. Six years before Vilgax, before the Forever Knights, before everything.
Six years to become something the universe had never seen.
I sat there in the empty classroom, listening to the fan hum and the faint sound of children laughing in the parking lot, and a slow, fierce grin spread across my face.
"Alright," I whispered. "Let's get to work."