Joshua Glass had always enjoyed swimming, and though he never entered any competitions he often thought about it. He'd been born in Cambridgeshire to two researchers in one of the many commercial drug labs which surrounded Cambridge like an ornate setting for that crown jewel of East Anglia. For his first eighteen years the course of his life wove through the world down a path as narrow as he allowed it to be.
He had just one real goal: get into Oxford University. For this, he flitted between subjects before deciding on biochemistry, which he decided was technical enough to excel in, without the worry of being in competition with any physicists.
He went to an excellent private school, and when asked he was always precisely as grateful for this as the rules of politeness required, but he'd found his classmates somewhat grating, and somewhat separate from himself. At many times, talking to those around him, seeing their struggles in maths, and chemistry, and biology (or, more likely, seeing their successes in football, and music, and art) he felt the sense of some transparent divider between them and himself. At the age of about thirteen, his teacher described him as "peerless" in front of the class, to which one of his classmates (he never found out which one) responded with a loud retort:
"Yeah, he's got no friends!"
So his studies were narrow and focused, he found a small cabal of friends who valued his intelligence, and even found himself a girlfriend, whose company he really did enjoy. It was no surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention when he received a notification of acceptance, least of all himself.
He worshipped the idea of Oxford, some temple upon the hill, at the fork of three great rivers, a place where he would blend and mingle with his \textit{own kind} for once. Now you might be asking: why Oxford? Wouldn't his kind be even closer at Cambridge? Certainly, that was where both his parents had attended, but he saw himself as something slightly different. Deep in his mind was that age-old myth of the sheltered child blossoming into a charming, charismatic, perhaps even wild and hedonistic young man at the first tastes of freedom. For that, he knew he ought to go to the slightly more party-ish and less study-ish of the two universities. He also wished to be further away from his place of birth, to outrun the past he saw as something of a lead weight.
Then he found himself actually showing up at the gates of St Catherine's College.
First: he'd broken things off with his girlfriend, clearly any decent charming hedonistic young man should be out there flirting with women.
Second: he'd bought some new clothes, shirts and undershirts, jeans and jackets, since clearly he should be dressing well.
Third: he'd taken up climbing, because he ought to be a man of health and vigour, and what better exercise than that?
So how did he fare in his endeavours during his four years of Biochemistry? On the first point I shall say as little as possible; Joshua for all his flaws still does not deserve the embarrassment of having that thread of his yarn told here. For the second he did alright, and was occasionally complimented (by friends, of course) on his choice of outfit, even when it was slightly ill-fitting or ill-put-together.
For the third, he really did enjoy it — even more than swimming — and spent perhaps two or three sessions a week at the local climbing gym, reaching ever upwards to the next plastic hold.
Perhaps inevitably, he fell in with a crowd of other biologists, chemists, and some of the more responsibly-behaved of the medicine students. A usual evening consisted of pushing through some coursework (or waiting for others to be done with theirs) before trying to convince them to go to the pub.
Like most of his generation (which is called either Gen-Z or the Zoomers depending on the current auspices) Joshua had been raised culturally bisexual, so he gave a sly smile to the twinkish bartender the way one might give a pet to the pub's cat. It was the first day of the second term of his third year of university.
He sat down at the table where his friends were waiting for him, completing a broken ring of diet cokes with a pint of cheap bitter. The conversation, as usual, turned to work. Sasha was complaining about essays, while Benjamin lamented an over-long organic chemistry project which was to take him the best part of a month. Joshua looked over at another table where a PPE student whose name he thought was Sophie was sitting on the end of a conversation, brushing dyed blonde curls to the side of her face as she leant in to sip what might have been a gin and lemonade.
"I'm just gonna go for a ..." he trailed off, standing up, and ...
[REDACTED TO PRESERVE JOSHUA’S DIGNITY]
.. he returned alone to his original table, where his absence had seemingly gone unnoticed. "Sophie" returned to the conversation on her table.
The conversation turned to trying to do good in the world. Of course, the medics had something of a home-field advantage in this particular discussion, but Benjamin was putting in a decent case for research.
"Yeah of course you could help out a good number of people as a doctor" he said "but really, that's not scalable! and if you weren't there, someone else would do the job"
"Someone worse would do the job" retorted Sasha "So I'm helping more than that other doctor."
"But what's the value of you over the other person? Most of the time you'll just be doing routine work, which the next-best person would still be good at!"
"Oh and its so different in research?" she said, which Ben was about to respond to when Louis, the lone mathematician of the group, interjected:
"Really the best thing to do is to go to Jane Street, make as much money as possible, and give it to charity."
"And which charity would you give to then?"
"I dunno, maybe animal welfare? Factory farming is pretty fucked up." responded Louis, to which Sasha glared at him while gesturing at the chicken burger on his plate. "Hey hey, hey... look I'm not perfect! Would you spend fourteen hours doing surgery, then give all the money you earned away to Ghana or something?"
There was a lull, then, finally, Joshua entered the conversation.
`"Jane Street isn"t enough, you need to be a really Great Man to do proper good. Or woman, of course. But the point stands, you need to get really rich or really powerful, anything else is peanuts compared to that.''
"Alright" said the last person seated at the table, "I get it, whatever helps people the most is what you already wanted to do."
Then there was a longer lull, more of an awkward silence really, while Joshua thought up counter-arguments to all the points that had been made against him. After a few minutes of this, he noticed that a fit of nervous sipping had emptied the pint glass in front of him, and he got up and left. He returned to his single bed and laid down on the duvet with a smug, satisfied smile.
As any silver haired crone, wizard, or fortune-teller will let on, greatness cannot be planned. For this reason, Joshua had (deliberately) had no idea what he wanted to do after he left university, until he was seized by a sudden panic in his final summer break, and began studying maths, models, and markets.
While he considered where the grand path of his life was to lead, he decided to apply to Jane Street, and — being a capable young man — he got a job offer, which he really did appreciate.
During his fourth year he mainly stewed in unnoticed resentment at those around him with more exciting pasts, more exciting presents, and more exciting futures. He still spent time with his friends, though he began to feel distant from them, as if a thin membrane had wrapped him up and separated him from the rest of the world. His shoulders slouched as if weights were set upon them, and he got worse at climbing, as if his body really had gotten heavier. On one occasion, he tried to go swimming, but found himself unable to float! He began to stay up later and later, more comfortable talking to others behind a screen, because the barrier which separated him from his online friends was physical, and thus more manageable, than the barrier between him and the rest of meatspace.
His sleep got worse, and he stopped dreaming, well, he no longer saw anything during his dreams. Instead his nights were narrated by the sound of steel on steel, scraping, distant at first, but as he hurtled towards the end of his degree, he found the noise getting louder and louder, and with it came an icy grip at the base of his spine, which inevitably turned into the feeling of being shaken awake, lying in a pool of sweat.
Naturally, he tried to avoid sleep. First coffee, then energy drinks, he'd cling to the dim light of a computer screen until three or four in the morning, then drag himself out of bed at seven-thirty, deliriously meander to his lectures, and start the day. He began to think that perhaps it was the city doing this to him, and so he booked the first train home the day after his graduation.
That night, for the first time in months, was silent.