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. So naturally, when the unregulated prediction markets came along Aaron was one of the first in line to sign up for an account. When I met him nearly two years later, he had lost all of his wages and his father's inheritance, and he was staring at the table, saying he had been close to winning big.