1 Dante

[Account Balance: $-2,345.44]

Dante's expression froze when he saw his new account balance after making a down payment for his new apartment. He had just come out of the real estate building too, and he was initially feeling good about everything.

Dante sighed and looked to the sky. At some point, drops of rain began to fall, which was kind of ironic given his current financial circumstances.

Were the heavens crying from sadness through empathy or laughter through mockery?

Dante sighed again. Truly, poverty would make any fellow have poetic and deep thoughts.

However, despite being in debt, Dante could truly claim to be poor. After all, he had grown up in an upper-middle-class family with two loving parents and a nuclear as well as extended family that were largely supportive and capable.

Dante smacked his face and changed his train of thought.

"You got this man, you made this decision and now you have to live with it."

Reminding himself of his own - probably - poor life decisions, Dante ordered an uber and set the destination to home. He then sat in the back lazily and leaned on their side, placing his earphones in as he opted to listen to hardcore rap music.

"~~Motherf*cker I killed three n***gas, f*cked three b*tches, and then robbed ten banks while smoking weed, and-"

As he soaked in the mindless words, his thoughts began to wander. He turned to look outside the window and saw the setting sun, which he initially felt was a sign that an old door was being closed in his life while a new one was being opened.

However, his balance had slapped him back to the reality that while a new door might have opened, what lay behind it was not exactly a frat party, but might be a neighborhood shootout.

Dante looked at the box in his bag and felt his eyes gleam. This was another reason why he had rapidly fallen into debt, the latest Huawei G20, a spectacular handheld phone made for enthusiasts and professionals who wanted to be productive on the go.

Its price tag was over $1500 for Christ's sake, and even the latest iPhone XV was even 300 dollars cheaper and about 20 years behind in technology.

What could Dante say, it was 2030 and China's technology was on the rise. After America's business empire declined due to the failure of fiat money and the betrayal of Saudi Arabia by eliminating the petrodollar, China quickly showed its fangs.

Not to mention, after raiding and plundering Taiwan, they had access to semiconductors and their technological might soared rapidly.

As a second-generation immigrant to the almighty United States of America, Dante was ambivalent about these happenings. For one, his relatively dark skin won him no favors with most Asians, and secondly, as someone who lived in America, his livelihood was tied to its continued dominance, like riding on the back of a tiger.

Dante's eyes flickered. Truly, he was thinking about all sorts of things, but the only thing he should consider now was what to do next; his future.

As a 21-year-old young man, he had endless prospects ahead of him. A second-class upper degree in BSc Software Engineering, a relatively good-looking face, and a good credit score thanks to intuitive parents, he had a great starting point.

Many would kill to have credentials like these, despite the debt. Not like any American was debt free anyway.

But what was the source of Dante's problems was not any external factor, but lay internally.

You may know what it's like to be a very clever kid in your formative years who loved to read, exercise and generally loved to explore new things, but had that all beaten out of you by the mindless school system which requires repetition rather than creativity.

You may know what it's like to be well-to-do during your school years, always having the latest games and computers, tinkering with them, and destroying enough of them that you got scolded often.

You may know what it's like to see your classmates struggle with their studies while things come to you relatively easily, until at some point you stopped putting in effort and got by with C's.

You also may know what it's like to love your cousins and extended family, but the pressure to perform due to endless comparisons cause a rift between you all during adulthood.

If you know any of these, and most likely all of them, you would understand Dante's conundrum.

Intelligent but unmotivated.

Competitive but quick to give up.

Tunnel visioned and unable to multitask.

And most crucially…

Driven for success through uniqueness but craving to do so independently.

Such led to the current situation where a young man from a family that makes more than $250,000 a year, is over $2,000 in debt.

This sudden drive for independence and the unwillingness to rely on his parents baffled the duo to no end, making them wonder if their son was going through a phase - but at his age? - or if someone was crudely influencing him.

His father wanted him to follow the same path he did and become a high-class architect to inherit his medium-scale company that mostly worked for upper-class contractors.

That way, he could push his son to the top of the business, lower the steep learning curve and also pass on his contacts and connections in the industry.

His mother, a chemical engineer working for the now beaten-up and bullied Pfizer, wanted him to learn an Applied Science. So she supported his decision to enter IT, but his father was not too happy that his hard work and small empire would die with him.

After all, how could a coder link up with architects? Unless maybe he learned 3D design and rendering.

Dante sighed for the third time in less than 30 minutes. His rash decision to rebel by doing what he wanted had led to a small tension in their nuclear family that became slightly more intense after the last Thanksgiving when his cousins were revealed to be Doctors, Pharmacists, and Lawyers and he opened his dog mouth to say 'I am an App Developer'.

Well, he was lucky it was 2030 and even the older generation understood that IT was the future. If it was around 20 or 10 years ago, most would have classified him as a failure right off the bat.

The painful question wasn't why he chose to be an App Developer. The hard-hitting question was: 'what app have you made?'

None. Nothing.

At least, nothing he wanted to show. Obviously, a few were from practicing, tests, and projects but none of them were going to go anywhere.

Dante looked down and gripped the phone box in his hands. With this new device, that should change though, as this device was built for people like him and came with many tools and suites to make coders excel.

He already had the code written on his laptop after spending over 3 weeks and screaming over 400 times at 'syntax errors' and only needed to package it and run the test build on the phone.

From there, any errors could be handled on the device itself and then curated carefully before a soft launch among peers and friends.

Just thinking about it made Dante giddy. He almost wanted to slap the back of his uber driver's head and tell him to hurry up, but was left speechless when he saw that there was traffic ahead of them.

He couldn't very well point to the pavement and say 'the sidewalk is good enough. Go!' like some 100-year-old British vampire who liked to pose and throw knives in stopped time.

Dante could only sit back and wait while his thoughts run abound, switching between excitement towards the - seemingly - promising future and anxiety towards the possibility of failure as well as disgrace.

Eventually the uber came to a stop before his house. Dante paid the fare with his credit card and increased his debt even more. However, with an exceptional credit score of 750, his credit limit was around $15,000 anyway.

It was more than enough for him to live on until he turned his first profit. Whether it was Muskovic, Billy The Gates, or the Zucc Meister, all had started from the bottom and had deceptively moving origin stories that motivated impressionable young men like Dante into risking it all.

With that much financial leeway, he would be able to kickstart his grand life!

Assuming of course, that everything miraculously works out on the first try, and he doesn't fail over and over until his debt runs high, and is able to make enough profit off whatever he creates that he can clear his debt, start a life and be fully independent.

This is the beginning of Dante's story, and it was quite impressive already.

However, the events in the next hour proved that Murphy was the number G.O.A.T in life as his law had an unbeatable winning streak against reality.