My Friend Aaron
The Chronicles of Aaron
By Rory McMeekin Published: August 21, 2026
🏫 The Early Years: Intelligence vs. Application
Our acquaintance began during our first year of school. At eleven years old, I candidly told Aaron I wanted to be his best friend. He declined, stating he already had one.
Aaron possessed a raw intellect that likely surpassed anyone in our cohort, yet he showed a complete lack of academic discipline. He didn't care for the curriculum; instead, he succumbed to a series of intense, non-scholarly obsessions.
The Obsession Cycle
By age seventeen, his primary focus was World of Warcraft. He didn't just play; he excelled, reaching a global rank of top-sixth. This specific number is etched in my memory because of a high-stakes wager:
The Bet: If Aaron could break into the top five worldwide, I would allow him to plagiarize my final year Physics coursework.
The logic of the bet looked something like this:
Before the gaming era, he had a brief, delusional phase where he believed he would become a professional football player, a claim that was difficult to reconcile with the fact that he was significantly overweight.
📉 The Great Divergence
When the time came for final grades, Aaron's lack of effort caught up with him. While the rest of our social circle transitioned to university, Aaron remained behind, slowly evaporating from our shared social consciousness.
He became a ghost—a talking point for the group during pub gatherings to which he was never invited. The conversations usually followed a predictable pattern:
- "Whatever happened to Aaron?"
- "Remember when he claimed he'd be the Prime Minister?"
- "Or that phase where he wanted to be a professional quiz show contestant?"
An Awkward Encounter
During one Christmas hiatus, my friends and I walked into a local pub only to find Aaron working as the bartender. He pointedly ignored us, and we retreated in a wave of sheepish embarrassment. I still feel a pang of guilt over this, as I was one of the few who maintained a sporadic connection with him.
My loyalty stemmed from a specific event in our youth. Aaron had once defended me against a bully with such violence that the assailant required emergency surgery to .
💹 The Risk-Taker's Path
Most of my peers pursued degrees in , , or , eventually landing roles as traders or analysts in the City of London. Ironically, this high-pressure environment was perfectly suited for Aaron. His addictive personality and appetite for risk were the exact traits required for stock trading.
When unregulated prediction markets emerged, Aaron jumped in immediately. These platforms allowed users to gamble on a vast array of outcomes:
| Market Type | Example Bet |
|---|---|
| Mundane | Fluctuations in the price of crude oil |
| Esoteric | The exact release date of a new video game |
| Pop Culture | The number of 'likes' on a celebrity's post |
After years of menial service work in bars and restaurants, Aaron viewed this as his golden ticket to wealth, achievable entirely from his bedroom.
🤝 The Reconnection
Life eventually brought me back home for a summer after the London startup where I worked as a programmer went bankrupt. Finding myself with few local companions, I reached out to Aaron.
Our first meeting at a café revealed the grim reality of his gambling. When the server came, Aaron asked for nothing but tap water.
"I can't afford a drink here mate," he admitted. "I've spent all of my wages."
He confessed that he had lost several thousand pounds—essentially his entire inheritance from his father—to the prediction markets. He lamented a missed opportunity regarding interest rates, claiming that if the platform hadn't blocked his trade, his return would have been:
Despite the loss, he remained defiant: I’m never giving these platforms another penny.
💻 A New Ambition
During a warm August stroll through the park, Aaron proposed a new venture: building his own prediction market exchange.
I was hesitant. I typically decline requests to build websites because people underestimate the labor involved. However, my lingering affection for him won out. I told him: "I've never built an exchange, but I know the fundamentals."
I set a set of prerequisites for my mentorship:
- Read several recommended technical books.
- Demonstrate a basic understanding of the concepts.
- (Future) Take me to dinner once the exchange is profitable.
Aaron proved to be a surprisingly diligent amateur coder. To fund his ongoing gambling habit, he began competing in hackathons. We would take the train into London together, and our 45-minute commutes were dominated by a single topic: The Simulation Hypothesis.
def world_status():
if simulation == True:
return "Everything is code"
else:
return "Reality is real"
I often sighed and asked him to change the subject, but while I wasn't a scholar of philosophy, I found myself drawn into his intellectual orbit once again.