Laurence Dalton was thirty, brilliant, and utterly useless.
Once hailed as a prodigy, he was the kind of boy who could read a university textbook over the weekend and explain it better than the professor on Monday. At fifteen, he'd built a quantum algorithm on a school library computer. At sixteen, he wrote a simulation of the stock market that accidentally crashed his school's entire server. Teachers called him a genius. Peers called him a freak. He didn't care. He never had.
Because brilliance, on its own, was nothing. Not without direction. Not without hunger.
Laurence had neither.
His mind was a Ferrari engine bolted to a rusted shopping cart. He could understand everything and accomplish nothing. He lived inside a storm of possibilities but never reached out to catch the lightning. Laziness wasn't just a flaw—it was his religion. He worshipped comfort, evaded ambition, and offered his time up as a daily sacrifice to the gods of distraction.
And so, the years slipped through his fingers like sand through a sieve.
By 2019, Laurence Dalton was broke, bitter, and alone. A man with a diamond mind buried beneath the debris of self-loathing and abandoned potential. His apartment, if it could still be called that, resembled a crime scene in a post-apocalyptic sitcom. Cold ramen cups nested on every surface. Amazon boxes—opened but never unpacked—littered the floor like forgotten dreams. The PlayStation sat lifeless beneath the TV, its red blinking light a silent scream. On his desk: a laptop filled with half-written business plans, tech startups that never made it past the design phase, and code repositories that hadn't been touched in years.
The world had moved on. He hadn't.
He had no job. No purpose. No savings. His social life had decayed into a string of ghosted messages and unanswered calls. The only voices he heard were YouTubers echoing into the early hours and the whispering churn of his own regret.
Then came the final blow.
Cancer. Stage IV. It crept into his father like a thief in the night, stealing weight, energy, and dignity one cell at a time. His father—once a pillar of strength, a man who could fix anything from cars to broken hearts—was reduced to skin stretched thin over bone, breath rasping through a morphine haze. Laurence watched it all, helpless, powerless. They couldn't afford the good hospitals, the experimental treatments, the hopeful odds. They watched the light go out slowly.
And Laurence hated himself for every second of it.
Two months later, fate twisted the knife. His mother collapsed in the kitchen, her body crumpling like paper. A stroke, the doctors said. They saved her life, but not her freedom. Now she lay in a narrow hospital bed with tubes in her arms and fear in her eyes, her right side paralyzed and her voice no longer hers.
The medical bills mounted with cruel efficiency. Final notices came in red. Debt collectors rang daily. His mother's eyes followed him with the silent weight of worry and apology, while Laurence sat beside her pretending to be strong.
He couldn't breathe.
One night, he found himself on the hospital rooftop. The air was sharp and cold, slicing through his hoodie and into the marrow of his bones. Below him, the city hummed with life—cars, neon signs, laughter, lovers—all ignorant of the man standing on the edge of it all.
The wind howled, as if urging him forward.
He stared out at the lights, fists clenched in the pocket of his jeans, and let the pain wash over him. The memories. The wasted time. The countless second chances he'd spat on. The raw truth that brilliance meant nothing if you never used it.
"All this potential," he whispered to the wind, his voice thin and broken. "Wasted."
A single tear traced the line of his cheek. And then—he stepped forward.
Into the dark.
And fall.