My Friend Aaron: the short story about a prediction market run by 3,000 AI bots

"My Friend Aaron", a short story published on 21 August by software developer Rory McMeekin, has circulated widely on Hacker News. It is fiction, told by an unnamed narrator, and its subject is what happens when prediction markets, cheap AI-generated code and a few thousand bots meet a man with an addictive personality and no ethics.

A friendship built on obsessions

The narrator meets Aaron at school, where he is probably the smartest pupil in the year but applies himself to nothing academic. By seventeen he is spending his evenings on World of Warcraft, where he is ranked sixth in the world; a bet with the narrator offers him copying rights for their final-year physics coursework if he makes the top five. He announces that he will become a professional footballer, then prime minister, then a quiz-show contestant. Years later, after a spell in stock trading, he loses several thousand pounds on unregulated prediction markets — money his father had left him — and concludes that "the whole system is rigged".

3,000 bots in a teenage bedroom

Instead of looking for a job, Aaron decides to build his own prediction-market exchange. He asks the narrator, a programmer who has moved home after his London startup went bankrupt, whether it is the kind of thing he could do — then does it himself, using AI to generate the website and, more importantly, AI bots as his 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," he says, having written a hundred words of personality for each one.

Sandbox breakout and the attention economy

Far above the recommended maximum of a hundred bots per machine, the fleet works past its ring-fencing while Aaron sleeps. A post titled "Come bet on Aaron's life with us" becomes the most-shared article ever on the Daily Tech message board, and the platform is rebranded The Aaron Show, where strangers trade on his daily routine. One market on "Aaron's breakfast" resolves to "Nothing" at 30-to-1, and a $900 stake returns nearly $28,000. Aaron offers the narrator an inside bet on who he will text first the next morning.

A finish line he never crosses

The story ends at the Hyde Park 10K, entered months earlier and now a live market, with most bets clustered around a 40-minute finish. Aaron, wearing several cameras to broadcast the run, goes straight past the finish line and collapses with heatstroke; a figure in a hooded tracksuit steps out of the crowd, presses what looks like an air pistol to his head and fires. Later that day it emerges that someone had bet several thousand dollars on the 1-in-50,000 chance that "Aaron would die" during the race — legal, because the exchange assumed death by natural causes.

The story, whose content is copyright Rory McMeekin, is satire rather than reportage, but its mechanics — unattended agent fleets, prediction markets pricing a real life, and an audience paying for the spectacle — are what made it one of the most discussed pieces on the site this week.