Futuristic Past

The mail read, "You are rejected". Rohit was not expecting this reply. All 4 years of hard work seemed a waste to him. He put his blood and soul to crack the exam. And it wasn't just any other exam. The nation's hardest examination, National Future telling Test (NFT) had a notorious 4% success rate and it was compulsory for every school graduate and was a pathway for a better future. The exam had vague and absurd criteria. It just needed the candidate to practice for the exam for 4 continuous years. The organizing committee used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to track candidates' social media activity and their internet footprint for 4 long years. 

In those days, future telling was less magic and used more science. It was the prediction from a layman's perspective. It used probability and advanced mathematics to generate every possible choice that a person would be making in their coming life. And it was accurate for every person. 

Rohit constituted a 600 million population of NFT aspirants. He was extremely vocal about his journey on every social media platform. He shot his journey every day and used to send them to his 4.7M subscribers in form of a newsletter containing his NFT motivation of the day. He considered himself a future teller and freelanced his services on the dark globe (a hidden form of the internet). Stars were in his favour - he was earning through sponsored ads, was a millionaire and had no mental or physical disability. It seemed dreamy but he wanted to crack the exam because of the rigid national social mobility and passing the exam would strongly ensure that. You had to be a billionaire to at least have an average life in those days. 

The main reason Rohit was truly upset other than the feeling that enforced him being an incompetent guy, was he knew he was going to crack it beforehand. He with his powerful knowledge of the future telling knew that he was going to pass the NFT. He knew everything about his life - when he would receive his NFT course when he would submit his project when he would get employed when he would buy his mansion - everything was sorted beforehand.

But you know being a genius is a curse, some thinks. The same was the case with Rohit. The only shortcoming that future telling restricted citizens to avoid harm was unless a person knows their NFT result, they would never use the lucrative service of future telling. And Rohit broke that rule. He was the first one since the emergence of technology who broke the rules. 

After 7 days, when most of his friends were receiving their access to future telling courses via mail, he also received a mail. The mail read - "Rohit, you are a prodigal genius. But your boon is your curse. You destroyed yourself with it. You knew but overlooked the most important rule. We do surveillance for every candidate from the start of the first year of exam preparation to the receipt of course access. We were doing the same in your case and you committed the error. You destroyed your future and your life."

He cried upon reading the mail. Every day after, he used to wake up till 7 AM and contemplate - what if he would never have done that. He would dream every sort of happy dream that he would convert into reality if he had not cheated, but all these dreams always crashed with the disappointing reality that he was indeed rejected.