My Friend Aaron

The following is a short story. ***** This one is about my friend, Aaron. I met him at school, and in our first year when we were eleven years old I told him I wanted to be his best friend but he said he already had a best friend. He was probably the smartest person in our year, but he didn't apply himself academically at all. Instead he was always becoming obsessed with things that weren't anything to do with studying. By the time we were seventeen he was spending all of his evenings playing World of Warcraft, which he was ranked top-sixth in the world at. I remember it was top-sixth because we'd made a bet that if he got into the top five I would let him copy my coursework for our final year Physics exam. This wasn't long after he had tried to convince everyone that he was going to be a professional football player despite being considerably overweight. He had an addictive personality. When he invariably didn't get the grades he needed to finish school and everyone from our friendship group went off to university, Aaron stayed behind and sort of just faded into the background of our collective consciousness. He was the person we would speak about at the pub reunions that nobody invited him to. 'What do you think happened to Aaron?' someone would ask. 'Do you remember the time he told us that he was going to become Prime Minister?’ 'How about when he said he wanted to become a professional quiz show contestant?’ someone else would add. One afternoon during Christmas break we ventured into a pub in the town where we all grew up and Aaron was working behind the bar. He pretended not to see us and we turned around and left in a sheepish hurry. I still cringe about that, especially because I was one of the few people who kept in occasional contact with Aaron. I had a soft spot for him because he had stuck up for me through a period of bullying much earlier on at school. He had slapped one of my bullies so hard that they had to have emergency surgery to reattach their right retina. Aaron got suspended for two weeks for that. For a long time I felt that I owed him. Many of my friends studied subjects like Maths, Physics, or Economics and went on to become financial analysts and traders working in the City of London. Ironically it was the sort of thing that Aaron was built for as stock trading is a good fit for someone with an addictive personality: every day is a high-octane day of risk and reward. So naturally, when the unregulated prediction markets came along Aaron was one of the first in line to sign up for an account. Prediction markets were websites where anyone could bet on anything. You could put money on mundane things like the price of oil going up or much more esoteric outcomes like when a video game would get released, or how many "likes" a pop star's social media post would garner. Aaron had spent several years doing bar and waiting work and felt now he was being handed an opening to become rich, all from his bedroom. ***** I had been working at a startup in London as a programmer, and the company had gone bankrupt so I decided to move home for a few months over the summer to figure out what I was going to do next. I hadn't texted Aaron for nearly two years but hardly anyone else was around, so I got back in touch with him. The first time we met up I suggested we go to a café and when Aaron arrived he asked for just a tap water. 'I can't afford a drink here mate,' he said, 'I've spent all of my wages.' I pried with a concerned look. He explained, 'The past few months have been tough for me. I thought I'd finally get a break and try my hand at the prediction markets.' 'Oh.' I remarked, as consolingly as possible. 'How much are you in the hole for?' 'A few thousand,’ he continued, 'My dad left me a bit of money and I used basically all of it.' He was staring at the table. 'I was really close to winning a lot. I'd had the whole thing mapped out. I had the perfect bet for U.S. interest rates but they wouldn't let me place it in time. I would have quadrupled my initial investment.’ By now he was looking up and to the side, shaking his head. ‘The whole system is rigged. I’m never giving these platforms another penny.' Soon after that, during a particularly long and balmy August evening walk together in the park, Aaron revealed to me he wanted to set up his own prediction market exchange. 'It can't be that hard,' he said. 'But I don't really know what I'm doing. Is that the kind of thing you could do?' I hesitated about my response because I almost always said no to people who asked me to help them make a website. People never seemed to understand how much time and effort it takes. 'I mean, I've never made an online exchange before, but I know what I'm doing,' I responded after a few, silent steps. My pitiful disposition for Aaron hadn't completely faded after all this time apart and I was feeling charitable. 'There are a couple of good books I can recommend, and once you've read them, I'd be happy to help you with things that I wish I'd known when I was starting out.' I concluded, 'And if — when — your exchange is successful, maybe you can take me out for dinner.' I didn't actually think he would even build an exchange, let alone it be successful, but I wanted to seed his mind with some encouragement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Aaron quickly became an industrious and capable amateur programmer. It was obvious to me that he still had a gambling habit and one of the ways he tried to earn some money to pay for this was by entering programming competitions called "hackathons". I had told him about hackathons, and we used to get the train into London together to get to them. During these 45-minute journeys, the most frequent topic of conversation was the Simulation Hypothesis: that the world we live in is in fact a simulated reality. It was always Aaron who brought this up. 'Don't you want to talk about something else?' I would sigh. I’m not the most well-read person in Philosophy but while I preferred to approach these discussions intellectually by talking about stuff I’d read about Descartes or one of my favourite films, The Matrix, Aaron invariably brought things back to his favourite film, The Truman Show. 'You might not be real mate,' he would say. ’Or you could be a paid actor! How do I know for sure that you're not?' he said to me once, jabbing my bicep with his large index finger. 'I think one day it will turn out that this life of mine has been a test. A test that I, duly, have passed,' Aaron had continued, weirdly almost proudly. I would often place my headphones over my ears after about 15 minutes of this repetitive, circular discussion and listen to some Radiohead while the trees blurred past us in the train's window. As I listened to the music, I would ponder Aaron's odd personality and his susceptibility to be paranoid. Although we didn't win that many hackathons we did end up coming runner-up in quite a few of them. Once, when we arrived at the venue, Aaron told me he wanted to enter the hackathon on his own. 'That's against the spirit of why I'm doing this with you,' I had warned him. He went ahead and worked on his own project anyway, and on that occasion he actually won the competition. I didn't really speak to him the entire trip back from that one. As we disembarked our train, I told him I wouldn't go with him again unless we agreed to enter together. We did carry on doing them together after that, but I was often worried he would ambush and usurp me again by going off by himself. Usually, the organisers of the hackathons were big artificial intelligence companies. They don't pay cash for anything other than the top prize, but they give the runners up credits that can be used on their AI platforms. It was with these credits that Aaron built his own private army. ***** Because we'd spent about seven years apart, once we became reacquainted our friendship was different. Most friendships change over time, of course, but if you stay friends with a person you don't tend to notice that change happening. As much as I benefitted from his company there were sides to Aaron that I despised and I don't think he really had much of a moral compass. He might've been a sociopath, I'm not sure. As much as I would have been wary for other friends developing a gambling addiction like Aaron's, I never really felt genuine sympathy for him because he didn't seem to care if his actions had consequences on other people. The first hackathon we partook in together we placed third, so we both won a substantial amount of credits that we could spend on AI "agents": little AI bots that you can program to do your bidding autonomously. I can't remember what I used mine for but it would have been something banal. Aaron decided to use his credits to scam people. 'I've got a plan to make a lot of money,' he confided in me, while we sat watching football in the living room of the apartment he shared with his mother. 'I instructed my bots to go out into the dark web and find data breaches. I've got about forty-thousand grannies' emails.' I remember his sideways, broad grin, with both of his eyes still on the TV screen. 'Another set of bots autonomously call these grannies up and tell them that their poor grandchild has been in an accident and urgently needs a few hundred quid.' I was just about managing to hide my revulsion. 'Want in?' he asked me, turning to look at me. I told him not to involve me as that kind of thing is against my values. 'OK spoil-sport,' he said, his eyes returning to the TV. We lived pretty close to one another and during school I would go round to Aaron's house for dinner a couple of times per week. His mother was a little woman who had looked after her only child, Aaron, all by herself. Being a single mother she must have been a considerably strong and independent person. But this was at odds with how she presented as a fragile, gentle, almost guileless woman. She was the kind of person who would blush