Forty minutes into his history exam, Bartholomew Chang was seriously considering leaving the rest of the page blank. "Those that don't learn history are destined to repeat it," he mumbled under his breath. Looking around the lecture hall turned exam theatre, he realized he was dangerously close to repeating one of those mistakes right then. Being the whimsical man he was, he had often started separate degrees of undergraduate study only to never finish them. And here he sat again, contemplating the same thing for the third time in three years. He couldn't help the unbidden questions that inevitably arose whenever he was about to transition into his second year of study in a degree program. "Is this really what I wish to do with my life?" he thought to himself. He knew where his current path was leading him. Stagnation. Just another failure in a long list that never seemed to end. A man that couldn't and wouldn't graduate because of his lack of commitment to a single objective. The world was not as it was, where an Arts degree was considered a waste of time and nearly useless to the more 'practical' nature of reality. There were startups springing up every week, many of which demanding a deep and thorough knowledge of history for the purpose of further public education and connecting the latest virtual reality companies to the past. 'Authenticity' was the name of the game. If you didn't at least have memorized the last fifty leaders of your country you would instantly fail the interview for such a position. And that was just the surface layer. Anyone could memorize a piece of information, but could you draw parallels to present day international relations and determine the best course of action for the powers of today based on the intertwining history of each complex and unique nation? If you couldn't even do that, good luck on lasting more than a week as even an unpaid intern. Education was free of course. It had been a few decades in the past when the last institutions released their strangle hold on information. Nothing like a few softly proposed total war alternatives to keep the other nations not interested in falling in line to do so... A strange world it had become, but one that Bartholomew endeavored to succeed in.

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But to do that, you needed a team. And what a team he had. They were waiting for him, in New California on the other side of the country. The wisdom of building a giant artificial island off the west coast and calling it a new state were disputed at first, but there was really nothing like the whole tech industry moving their headquarters there to silence the naysayers. It would succeed, or it'd burn to the ground. The future remained unset in that regard.

There was a reason people started their own businesses instead of joining an existing one. Some visions for the future were simply incompatible. You could try to continue cooperating, but eventually the differences would tear the dream to pieces. But he knew their dream, he knew and trusted them. Once he graduated, they'd be waiting for him. If he graduated at all.

He glanced around at his fellow classmates, each furiously writing away as if there wasn't enough time to even finish answering all of the multiple choice questions, which he supposed there wasn't. Bartholomew was aiming on getting 80% of it done before they started, which was a pretty respectable amount considering the average is closer to 50% on these kinds of things. But now. He was unsure. He couldn't bring himself to move his pencil any further down the page. One of his classmates noticed his aloofness and mouthed 'focus', before turning back to his own test. It was like a meteorite smashing through an interplanetary defence shield at half the speed of light. He almost dropped his pencil. There was no way he could let this test end like this. Yes. He'd disappoint himself and his friends if he failed again. But that wasn't all. Because graduating wasn't the only thing he'd promised them he'd do. He could remember it now, silently he repeated "I will try my hardest at whatever I attempt, and will not yield until I succeed,"