If there was anything negative to come from becoming valedictorian of his whole graduating class, to immediately being placed in one of the top university positions in all of Ike Holdings, A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of GroCorp, it was his family’s reaction.

Or, rather, the lack of any reaction at all.

He got home, his servants removed his jacket, and he went right over to his mother and father who were sitting on separate couches in the living room, watching two entirely different TV shows on their smartglass cyber devices.

“Good job, Arn--” his servant began, but he cut them off before they could continue speaking.

“Mom, dad, did you hear the news?” he asked excitedly.

Both of them looked at him, and then one brief moment later, they returned to their shows without another word.

He guessed it was a subject that would come up at the family dinner...

Well, you know what? He didn’t need their approval. He was going to be ruling over them soon enough, and he’d do it without their assistance in any way. People in the lower classes had it so easy, with families that cared about them. So much privilege he simply was never afforded. Nonetheless, he would succeed.

Arnold went upstairs to his bedroom, grabbed a box of tissues, and sat down on his bed to meditate and think about the things that had happened, the things that would happen.

He thought long and hard about how well his plan needed to work for him to really go off. He imagined what it would be like, finally scoring with Katherine Debs, finally seeing the inside of those magnificent thighs her skirt always left uncovered.

One time, after a rainstorm a few years ago, when they were on a field trip to the great organic dairy farms of Chippewa, the two of them were forced to take refuge under a tree after they both got soaked. They spent the time until the storm passed chatting, just killing time like friends do, but all along Arnold noticed something very important: The white shirt of her uniform was completely wet, and he could see her dark purple bra underneath.

Let it be known that Arnold would never forget a moment like that, so long as he lived. One day, he’d see underneath that purple bra, but he’d never leave this defining moment out of his internal history.

Eventually, the servant called him to dinner, and his whole family gathered in the dining room with an excellent meal cooked up by the house’s Smart AI system. Yum.

His mother and father sat at opposite ends of the dining table, with his extremely pale older sister Emmalee and his extremely tan older brother Braedyn. They were twins, born at the same time six years before him, and both born to be the ultimate members of the human race. Indeed, they were genetically engineered as test tube babies; their parents were early adopters of the designer gene fad and they were two of the earliest success stories in the whole Midwest region.

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Arnold was the result of oral birth control’s nine percent failure rate, so he didn’t have any of the genetic benefits that Emmalee and Braedyn were given. He was smart, but he wasn’t a genius; he was handsome, but he didn’t have women and men begging at his feet for just a taste of his skin.

They did, and they didn’t use it for anything.

Both of them dropped out of college before getting their degrees. They weren’t hereditary employees, so they didn’t need it, and their parents somehow supported it. They let them live at home and eat all the same meals even if they were pulling in income that wouldn’t let someone survive even in the cheapest apartments in the arcology.

Right now, Braedyn was training every day at the gym to try and get on the local rugby team and work his way into the majors by way of intramural success. It wasn’t unheard of, especially not for a guy as washed-ab and hard-ironed as him, but it wasn’t the kind of career path for the son of a corporation manager, that was for sure.

His sister Emmalee was even worse off; by day she was always writing her little books on the internet and posting them on some site called Royals of the Road or something like that. He didn’t know, because she always got really mad when anyone tried to read her stuff, like the bitch she was. The book was something about a boy who could travel back in time and had to relive the same lifetime over and over until he got lots of power. She got some money on Patreon for the story, but it wasn’t enough to really bother mentioning. Then, by night Emmalee basically went to clubs or bars every single night without fail, like it was some sort of religious experience (ew, religion, but whatever). She always stayed over with some random guy, or occasionally some random girl, and so she was only home about three days a week anymore, at this point; those were her writing days, after all.

It was a shame, too, about Emmalee. She was such a voluptuous, commanding presence with a perfectly freckled face and a figure that dazed women and men alike. Her body was perfectly crafted to lead a runway line or to fit into an executive’s low-cut pantsuit, even if she would never come close to either of those things. She didn’t deserve to be some common slut, and yet that’s where her life led her because she, like her twin brother, didn’t have much of any aim in life.

Arnold was nothing like them. He was barely anything like his parents, who still hadn’t even spoken to him about his getting a valedictorian position, by the way. They didn’t expect much of him when their designer babies turned out so rotten, and that’s where they were wrong.

He wasn’t going to be sold into the concubine of some richer family. He was going to climb the ranks and become a full-on executive of Ike Holdings, A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of GroCorp, even if he had to step on the heads of his entire family to do that.

That’s why he blew his college tuition on Tower of Somnus. That’s why he dedicated his whole life to a commoner girl who only saw him as a friend. Because Arnold was the kind of risk taker who made massive, Gamestop-level dividends when his plans succeeded.

The servant brought out the dinner, and it was Arnold’s favorite, which means at least the Smart AI in the home remembered that he was worth celebrating. He got his valedictorian supper: cherry pie with whip cream, and a side of steamed broccoli. Yummy!