The shopping cart had a bad wheel.
It was the kind of small, stupid annoyance that somehow summed up an entire Tuesday the wheel that spun sideways instead of forward, dragging against the floor with a rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape that drew the quiet irritation of every person in the cereal aisle. He'd tried switching carts twice. The universe, apparently, had opinions about his morning.
He didn't even remember what he'd gone to the shop for originally. Milk, maybe. He'd left with milk, a box of biscuits he didn't need, a discounted rotisserie chicken that smelled incredible, and a vague sense that he'd forgotten the one thing he actually came for.
The automatic doors slid open and the cold air hit him that particular grey, damp cold that didn't commit to being proper winter but refused to let go of autumn either. He squinted up at the overcast sky, plastic bags cutting into his fingers, and thought about nothing in particular.
He heard it before he saw it.
A sound that didn't belong a deep, mechanical groan from above, like the world had developed a structural problem somewhere overhead. It was wrong in a way that bypassed logic and went straight to the spine. He looked up.
A truck.
A very large, very airborne truck, cab-first, falling from a sky that had absolutely no business containing trucks.
He had perhaps one and a half seconds to process this information.
In that time, he thought: that's a lot of truck.
Then Truck-kun introduced itself.
There was no pain.
That was the first thing he noticed. After a collision that, by all rights, should have reduced him to something discussed in hushed tones at a coroner's office, there was simply nothing. No body. No cold. No shopping bags cutting into fingers that no longer existed.
Just dark, and then, gradually, stars.
Not a ceiling painted with stars. Not a screensaver. Actual stars, spread across an infinite black canvas in every direction, close enough that he felt he could reach out and burn his hand on them. Nebulae drifted in slow, impossible colours purples and deep reds and greens that had no name in any paint catalogue. Galaxies turned like slow wheels in the far distance.
He was standing on nothing. He was standing perfectly comfortably on nothing, which suggested the nothing had been upgraded to support standing.
"You took that rather well," said a voice.
He turned.
The being and being was the only word that came close was difficult to look at directly, not because it was blinding but because it kept being subtly different each time his eyes tried to settle on it. Tall, then not. Old, then ageless. Its edges didn't quite agree with the space around them. It wore something like a robe, or maybe that was just how infinity looked when it tried to dress casually.
Its eyes, when he could catch them, were amused.
"Most people scream," it continued, folding something like hands behind something like a back. "Or cry. One man I processed last Tuesday delivered a fourteen-minute monologue about his mortgage. You just looked at truck-kun and thought that's a lot of truck. I appreciated that."
He stared at it for a moment.
"Am I dead?"
"Comprehensively," the being said, not unkindly. "Truck-kun was… thorough."
He processed this. He looked down at where his hands would be, and there they were his hands, normal, unharmed, attached to a body that had no right to still be in one piece. He flexed his fingers experimentally.
"Right," he said. "And you are?"
The being smiled, which was an experience rather than an expression. "You can call me the ROB. It stands for"
"Random Omnipotent Being," he said.
A pause. The stars drifted.
"...You're familiar with the concept," the ROB said, sounding genuinely surprised for the first time.
"I've read enough fanfics to know roughly how this goes," he said, crossing his arms. Something was happening in the back of his mind the particular clicking-into-place feeling of a person who has just realized that a situation, however bizarre, can be worked with. "You're going to tell me I'm being reincarnated somewhere. You'll offer me something to sweeten the deal. And then I'll go." He tilted his head. "How close am I?"
The ROB regarded him with what might have been the cosmic equivalent of raised eyebrows.
"Remarkably close," it admitted. "I was going to ease into it."
"Where am I going?"
The ROB gestured, and the stars rearranged themselves coalescing, spinning down into something recognizable. A world. A continent. A map that he knew, that anyone who'd spent enough evenings in front of a television or bent over a fantasy novel would know. The shape of it hit him somewhere between the chest and the stomach.
Westeros.
"Game of Thrones," he said flatly.
"The locals call it the Seven Kingdoms," the ROB said mildly.
"I know what the locals call it." His mind was already moving, already sorting, already pulling up everything it had ever filed away about this world. The politics. The families. The timeline. The deaths especially the deaths. A cascade of images that made something cold settle into his chest. Ned Stark kneeling on the Sept of Baelor. The Twins. The burning of King's Landing. "I know this world. I know what happens in it."
"Yes." The ROB didn't seem troubled by this. "That knowledge will remain with you. Consider it part of the arrangement."
"What's the arrangement?"
The ROB spread its hands an expansive, magnanimous gesture that managed to encompass several galaxies. "You will be reincarnated as Robb Stark, eldest son of Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell, at the age of fifteen. You will have two years before events begin to move in earnest. And" it paused for effect, "you will be granted three wishes, to be chosen now, before your rebirth."
He was quiet for a moment.
The ROB waited, looking pleased with itself.
"Three," he said.
"Three."
"Standard wishes? No limits on what I can ask for?"
"Within reason," the ROB said, which he noted was not the same as no limits.
"Define reason."
"I won't make you a god. I won't unmake the story entirely the world must remain functional, not solved. No wishing for infinite wishes," it added, with the tone of someone who'd had that conversation too many times. "But within those parameters, I am generous."
He nodded slowly. Then he started to think out loud, which was something he did when problems got interesting enough to deserve it.
"Robb Stark," he said. "Okay. First thing Robb Stark dies because he's outplayed politically and outmatched militarily in an asymmetric conflict against people who don't follow his rules. He's brave, he's talented, but he's still young when all of this starts and he's working with what nature gave him." He looked at the ROB. "So. First wish. Training. Whatever I train, whatever I practice I want a multiplier. Ten to one. One push-up counts as ten. One hour of sword work counts as ten. Every session, every drill, every rep."
The ROB considered. "Physical training multiplied tenfold. Done." A small inclination of what served as a head. "That is reasonable, and I confess it's one of the more elegant requests I've heard."
"Second wish," he continued, and there was a rhythm to it now, the rhythm of someone building an argument they'd been wanting to make for a long time. "No biological ceiling. No cap. No point where my body or my mind says this is as far as we go. Unlimited potential. I keep improving as long as I keep working."
The ROB was quiet for a beat longer this time.
"That," it said, "is a cleverer wish than it sounds."
"Most people would wish to already be strong," he said. "I'd rather just never stop getting stronger."
"Granted," the ROB said, and there was something in its voice that might have been respect. "Your third wish?"
He took a breath.
This was the one he'd been building toward. This was the one that mattered most, because strength and endurance would let him survive Westeros, but this this was what would let him change it.
"Genius-level intellect," he said. "Not just smart I mean genuinely exceptional. Reed Richards. Batman. The kind of mind that looks at a problem and sees seventeen solutions before most people have finished reading the question."
"That can be arranged," the ROB said carefully. "Though I note that is you are not finished."
"yes, i'm not finished."
The ROB waited.
"With that intellect," he continued, "I want a book. A physical book that only I can see and read no one else, not ever, regardless of circumstance. And in that book, I want a complete record of human technological development. Everything. Metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, engineering, chemistry, mathematics, military tactics, sanitation all of it, explained in terms I can actually apply, not just understand theoretically."
The silence that followed was longer than the others.
The ROB looked at him. He looked back.
"You understand," the ROB said slowly, "that what you are describing is the capacity to advance an entire civilization by centuries."
"Yes."
"That the consequences of that would be… unpredictable. Possibly enormous. Possibly catastrophic in ways you cannot anticipate."
"Also yes." He didn't flinch. "But Westeros is heading toward catastrophe anyway. The Long Night is coming. Dragons are coming back. The kingdoms are going to tear each other apart just in time to be completely unprepared for an army of the dead. Whatever chaos I introduce, it can't be worse than what's already scheduled." He paused. "And I know enough about that world to know that nothing changes if nobody changes it."
Another long pause.
Then the ROB smiled slow, wide, genuinely delighted in a way that lit up the surrounding three star systems.
"You haggled with me," it said. "No one haggles with me."
"You said within reason. A book only I can read, knowledge I still have to actually learn and apply that's within reason. You're not handing me a solved world. You're handing me a library and a brain capable of using it."
"The third wish," the ROB said, as if tasting the words, "is granted. Intellect, and the Book." It tilted its head. "You are either going to do something remarkable with this, or you are going to discover precisely why omnipotent beings set limits in the first place."
"Probably both," he admitted.
"Probably both," the ROB agreed.
The stars began to move. The world below Westeros, grey and green and cold grew closer, or he grew toward it, it was hard to say which. He felt himself beginning to thin at the edges, the borrowed body of his afterlife dissolving back into something new, something waiting.
"One last thing," the ROB said, and its voice was coming from everywhere and nowhere now, vast and faintly amused. "Robb Stark was a good man. Try not to waste that."
He thought about Ned Stark. About the Red Wedding. About a world that ate good men alive and called it politics.
I know, he thought. That's the whole problem.
And then he was gone, and Westeros was waiting, and somewhere in Winterfell a fifteen-year-old boy opened his eyes for the first time and understood, with cold and perfect clarity, exactly what was coming.