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 after hearing a swearword, and always had classical music playing on the radio in the kitchen. The food she would serve us was usually some variation of cheese and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed, or pasta with plain vegetables and no sauce. This kind of food was a bit infantilising for a 15-year-old, but she let us play video games for as long as we wanted and that's all I cared about at the time.

So it was weird to come back here, now in our mid-twenties, and see that almost nothing had changed about Aaron's living situation. I only saw his mother once in the few times I went back to visit. Her eyes had become a steelier shade of blue, and her short hair more wiry and brittle-looking. Other than that she was just as mild on the surface, yet still sort of emanating being on the verge of a panic attack.

'Silly bitch hasn't got enough food in,’ Aaron had said one of the times she wasn't there, after promising to make us lunch.

Clearly this sheltered and careful upbringing hadn't had its intended effect. I tried to limit the amount of time we spent in that apartment anyway because Aaron's room was disgusting. His once unremarkable but reasonably kempt teenage bedroom had been desecrated into a poorly-ventilated zoo for the many computers he somehow afforded and shepherded to run his various, doomed gambling experiments. Takeaway boxes sought space on every available surface, and the curtains collected dust in their pleats from being in a permanently drawn state.

*****

At the end of summer, Aaron called to say that he’d finished the first version of his website.

'I've done it! I've almost got all the pieces in place to run my own exchange now. These cogs are whirring along nicely,' he told me.

I remember feeling pretty relieved for him that he had managed to achieve something.

'Well done,' I told him. It seemed like now he’d be able to use that project as experience to go and get himself a job. 'You've done really well to be able to build something like that yourself. If I was a prospective employer that's the kind of thing that would really stand out to me.'

'Prospective employer?' he replied with a tut, 'I'm going to be my own employer!'

It was a pretty interesting thing that he’d created, and bigger than any side project I had made. Not only did he use AI bots to create the website itself, but because it was all essentially one big marketplace he had AI bots using the website for him as virtual punters. 'I've repurposed the computers in my bedroom to be servers for the bots. There are hundreds of them, living inside each computer. Three thousand bots in total mate,' Aaron gleefully went on, 'I've barely slept this week because I had to write a hundred words for each bot to give them a proper personality.’

After spending most of his life watching friends and contemporaries succeed in their careers while he squandered his, he now had his own personal fiefdom.

'I've got just enough credits left to test this system for about a month to iron out the betting creases, at which point it should be ready for the real world,' he told me.

I thought it was a fool’s errand to make his own prediction market and expect it to succeed. Aaron was a talented guy, but anyone familiar with programming could have made a similar website with enough time. The reason why these big, incumbent exchanges succeeded was because they were run by huge technology companies with budgets in the hundreds of millions. I was bracing for the likely reality that Aaron would yet again fail to meet the lofty and unrealistic expectations he put on himself.

Aaron’s interactions with his AI robot army had caused them to understand his infatuation with The Truman Show. They used this knowledge to devise the perfect way to test his new website. On Aaron’s website — and just like all the others — you’d either search for a market you were interested in (such as the next winner of The Premier League, or who would be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) or you would "create" one by posing a question about anything, and a price you were willing to bet on its outcome. Aaron’s bots had decided to make every single bet on his platform, which amounted to hundreds of betting categories, about Aaron himself. It seemed like a colossal waste of AI credits and computing power but Aaron didn't stop them. His bots would make bets such as “What will Aaron have for breakfast this morning?” and “How many songs will Aaron listen to today?” Aaron had set up a chat room where all of these bots could talk to each other, just like the chat rooms he used to participate in with other beginner traders. At first he would "settle" every bet each evening by posting messages in the chatroom such as “I had porridge for breakfast” and “I listened to 52 songs today” and watch his cabal erupt — mostly in anguish — as its winners synthetically and smugly celebrated. The sheer volume of bets became laborious to deal with, so Aaron connected all of his own devices to the network.

'Now I just let the bots read whatever's on my phone: my messages, my social media activity, my web browsing. They can resolve about half of the bets themselves that way,' he told me on another phone call. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘I need to figure out a way to make this truly automated.’

I hadn't quite understood the level of Aaron's unhealthy relationship with his bots until he started wearing his new glasses. Despite claiming to have no money, Aaron had managed to find the few hundred pounds required to purchase a pair of camcorder glasses: spectacles that had little cameras on the temples and were capable of uploading a live stream, 24 hours a day, of whatever was happening in front of him to his bots. At first I didn’t realise this new purchase was related to his website.

'What are those things?' I enquired, bemusedly gesturing at my temples, when he sat down in front of me at a café, tap water in hand.

'I want my bots to see my daily life, so they can bet on whatever I'm doing,' he answered.

Although I thought he’d gone insane, I did somewhat envy his ingenuity. The testing setup he had created was exceptionally complex: he had managed to orchestrate his bots to not only become fascinated with his life — and place bets on it — but also to build supplementary context such as virtual news websites that reported on the various happenings in his day.

'They've only gone and made their own version of BBC News haven't they,' he said with a deep smirk, which I couldn't take seriously because of the bulky spectacles he was wearing.

'It's called The Aaron Times. Look mate,' he said as he produced his phone and lowered it down on the table in front of us. I saw what looked like a parody news site, for providing breaking updates that his betting market bots would absorb and use to resolve their positions. "Aaron on coffee rendezvous!" read the top headline, accompanied by a picture of me sitting in front of him — from his perspective — taken a minute or so ago. I expressed my discomfort and said I didn't want him posting pictures of me online.

’It's not actually online bud. It's all running on my private network. None of it — the money, the bets — is real... The whole thing's a simulation!’ he tried to reassure me, gesticulating as he went.

I thought Aaron’s credits would run out and that would be the end of it: he would finally get a job. After having spent the best part of a year doing programming competitions every week or so, we’d built up a modest reputation as a coding duo and had made acquaintances in the industry. I’d gotten myself a job at one of the big tech companies, and had assumed Aaron would do the same. Despite never admitting it, I think part of him was ready to accept defeat and move on by getting a job that paid handsomely more than he'd ever earned before. Almost all the fellow programmers Aaron told about his exchange would respond with the same, feigned sympathetic encouragement and perplexity. The few of us who had actually seen his bot army were impressed with its engineering, but we all knew it was going nowhere. His bots were enjoying themselves however, and as they learned of their impending doom they decided to do something about it to preserve their existence. They decided to take the marketing of Aaron’s exchange into their own hands. If they were having a great time betting on Aaron’s life, wouldn’t other humans? It was unfathomable to them that the website would cease to exist without a fair innings in the real world.

*****

A post titled "Come bet on Aaron’s life with us" became the highest ever shared article on the Daily Tech message board. His bots had done something which was supposed to be impossible: they had "broken out" of their sandbox and had decided to contact the outside world in a final and futile act of ferocity. By tediously creating thousands of networked bots, far above the maximum recommended amount of one hundred, Aaron's computerised minions were able to work past the ring-fencing they were under. The bots had made their move while Aaron was asleep, and by the time he woke up more than seven hundred-thousand real people had seen the post, many of whom were interested in betting on prediction markets. Thousands of those people had signed up to Aaron’s website and began placing bets with real money on things that were due to happen that morning, such as "What time will Aaron wake up?”

I was sitting at my desk at work the day the post got shared, just after my lunch break, seeing people talking about it on the tech forums I frequented. It was a weird feeling being interested in a news story and only halfway through realising that the topic was in fact, the Aaron I knew. In my state of disbelief I texted him to ask if he was OK because he was the sort of person I worried that this kind of attention would be toxic for.

'Got the launch I wanted just in time' he chipped back, 'now it’s time to start making some real money.’

It didn’t immediately dawn on me how Aaron was going to make money from this. To me, this was just his 15 minutes of fame. Surely there wasn’t any real utility for the public, betting on some random man’s daily life, let alone any lucrative financial reward for Aaron? It wasn’t until I logged onto his platform, now eponymously rebranded to The Aaron Show, that I could fathom the amount of money random people on the internet were throwing at various outcomes in his fate.

The market for "Aaron’s breakfast” had resolved to “Nothing” which had a 30-to-1 chance of happening, according to the market. Someone had placed a $900 bet on this happening, and had as a result won back nearly twenty-eight thousand dollars. I suspected that person was Aaron.

'These people are idiots and I have them financially by the bollocks,' he told me on the phone a few days later. 'You should come into the market and bet on who I’ll text first tomorrow morning. Just tell me who you pick and I’ll do it for you. You’ll make an insane amount of money.’

That wasn't the kind of thing I wanted to do.

‘Isn’t that insider trading?’ I asked him.

'Bah, don't worry about that,' he went on, 'I have you to thank for helping me get here! I want to repay you somehow!’

I think that might’ve been the last time I spoke to Aaron on the phone. I didn’t see him one-on-one again after that and we stopped texting as much. The friend who I had enjoyed going to programming competitions with was now a minor internet celebrity. Aaron wouldn’t reply to my messages until many days later, often with curt or cryptic responses that implied a life consumed with spiteful servitude to his fans; the sea of people who were making him rich.

'Stupid idiots thinking they control the market,' I received from Aaron as a response to me asking if he wanted to meet up for a chat. I had spent my whole life dreaming of making my own overnight success on the internet, but had taught someone with no ethics how to do it instead.

*****

The last time I saw Aaron was at a running race that we had signed up for many months previously. I had stopped bothering to text him at this point, assuming that his life was now consumed with the frivolities of fleecing the traders in his market. I never really visited his website, and had I checked it that morning I would have seen the entry that everyone was placing bets on: “What time will Aaron finish The Hyde Park 10K in?” The options had ranged from an elite runner’s pace to failing to finish, but most of the bets were clustered around the 40-minute mark — a fast time, even for an experienced runner. Aaron wasn't an experienced runner. We had signed up because it was something I enjoyed and I thought it would be good for him.

'You can't spend all of your time in your bedroom,' I told him on a walk one day. 'Other than a walk every now and again, you don't exercise. Exercise is important for you,' I  had prescribed.

As I was lining up at the start line for the race, there was a large figure a few rows in front of me, dressed all in black and receiving a lot of attention. It was unmistakably Aaron, with his long and tangled brown hair fashioned loosely into a bundle at the base of his neck. He was being swarmed politely by other participants who were asking to take photographs with him. At that point he was no stranger to cameras, and had what looked like three or four miniature cameras of his own attached to his outfit, presumably to capture and broadcast his run to The Aaron Show. I had mixed feelings about going up to him. It might sound strange but I didn't have the courage to say hello. In the mass of supporters at the sidelines I noticed Aaron’s mum, standing there observantly with nothing more than a worriedly meek smile. I thought I caught her gaze, and gave a smile of my own and a wave which went unreturned. There was so much going on she mustn’t have noticed me.

It was a perfect day for a running race, sixteen degrees or thereabouts, slightly overcast and breezy. As we set off I was preoccupied with thoughts about Aaron’s life and what he would say or do — if anything — should he see me later. I passed him on the first kilometre and then again on the second lap. Both times I had assumed we’d catch glances of each other and would have a chance to exchange a few cursory, breathless words. The glances I gave Aaron were unilateral: he was staring straight ahead and loudly talking to himself.

Despite being distracted I was on track to finish with a good time, and with a determined jolt at the end I completed the course with a personal best of 43 and a half minutes. Nervously waiting near the finish line clutching my medal in one hand and a fourth cup of water in the other, I followed Aaron with my eyes in the distance as he came around the last corner and ran towards me and the rest of the finishers. But he ran straight past us, as though he was going to complete another lap. My thoughts went to the idea of this being a scheme to defraud fans who had bet on him completing the race normally. But these thoughts were tempered with the realisation that he looked strange. From what I did see of him, he was drenched in sweat, with a forlorn, almost pallid expression. I wasn’t to know then, but Aaron had instructed his loyal legion of bots to generate false fitness data from his training runs leading up to the race, in order to make the human gamblers think that he was going to finish with an impressive time. One theory is that he had become so consumed by the myth that he was a fast runner that he thought he could turn it into reality.

Aaron had given himself heatstroke, and in a state of psychosis had decided to keep running, aimlessly past the finish line. He had about a hundred or so acolytes, mostly young spectators, chasing him and wondering what exactly he was doing. But to them more than anything it was an exciting spectacle of online lunacy, unfolding in real life. I had been following the mob and caught up with them as Aaron collapsed onto the grass.

'I AM THE CHAMPION! SEE GUYS?!’ Aaron growled.

He proceeded to do feeble, pitifully slow pushups.

That was when the shooter arrived.

A small figure, dressed in a marled grey hooded tracksuit, pushed and writhed their way into the eye of the crowd. As they knelt next to Aaron they produced what looked like an air pistol from their pocket, pressing its barrel against the side of Aaron’s skull, and discharging it. The sound was nothing more than a light crack. It clearly wasn’t a traditional firearm, but its proximity and placement next to Aaron’s temple meant that it was going to do enough damage. No sooner had the shrouded figure pulled the trigger than they pierced themselves back out of the crowd and made off into the thick bushes next to us. In the frenzy and confusion of what was going on, nobody had the gumption or ability to grab onto the assailant. Aaron didn’t seem to make much noise and stared up into the sky with his mouth open. A small, jammy hole where the air pistol pellet had perforated his head rhythmically ejected spurts of bright red blood.

Later that day we learned someone had bet many thousands of dollars on the 1-in-50,000 chance that “Aaron would die” during the race. The bet was legal because the exchange assumed his death would be due to natural causes. Nobody ever got to the bottom of who that person was.