Murder is always systematically kind of a dramatic act. We are definitely going to get a prediction market murder in <5 years, I think.
myhf · 2026-08-25 17:21:43 UTC
Every prediction market is an assassination market. They claim to trade on "information" but it's more like "influence", and easiest way to influence an event is usually by sabotage.
stronglikedan · 2026-08-25 17:50:26 UTC
a tale as old as time. e.g., fixing a fight or a game
1dom · 2026-08-25 17:47:50 UTC
I learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market in the early 2010s. It wasn't phrased like a prediction market focusing on when a person would die, but more like a bounty. If the bounty/pot got big enough, eventually it would be worth it for someone to do it.
Even thinking/writing about this now, it still makes obvious sense and I'm surprised it hasn't been seriously made yet with crypto: if there's a pot of billions, contributed to by millions, the incentive becomes not just about the money, but the adoration, protection and power that would come with doing so many people a favour.
nemomarx · 2026-08-25 18:11:57 UTC
I think all the big targets for this kind of thing have the legal or government muscle to get in your way? Millions of people usually don't agree on someone dying unless they're powerful.
rad-b · 2026-08-27 09:54:23 UTC
It seems to me you underestimate the challenges of getting the money from such crypto scheme. A murderer would have to prove to the pot owner that they are, in fact, the real murderer and not someone pretending to be one to get the money. However, there’d be another actor trying to prove who the murderer is - the police. So, you’d practically have to dox yourself in order to get the money, or be able to have such a strong privacy system that a state actor cannot break it and identify you from your communications with the pot owner (lol). If you have such a strong cyber security system, you’re probably better off just selling it for $$$$$$ than muurdering randos.
But these problems would likely be self-resolving in most cases as the crypto pot owner would simply rug-pull everyone.
ekianjo · 2026-08-26 03:37:57 UTC
thats already on a table when you place a prediction that is related to an Individual doing something. you dont even need to spell it out. not sure how we are going to regulate those
stephenlf · 2026-08-25 17:20:32 UTC
Spooky and riveting!
sarreph · 2026-08-25 17:49:02 UTC
Thank you very much.
moralestapia · 2026-08-25 17:43:03 UTC
Man this piece should win an Emmy or something, it's so original and well written. I also couldn't spot much AI in there. Props to the author.
One of his songs is called "Do androids dream of real sheep?"
What a fresh take on that classic quote! Made me spurt my kombucha, lol.
How can someone be SO talented. Thanks for sharing.
sarreph · 2026-08-25 17:45:49 UTC
Such kind words…! I’m so honoured and humbled. Thank you.
P.S. - I didn’t use LLMs to write it, no! :)
alun · 2026-08-25 17:49:13 UTC
Very fun read. Thanks for posting it!
sarreph · 2026-08-25 18:56:01 UTC
Appreciate the comment :)
greenfish6 · 2026-08-25 17:52:08 UTC
Powerful. And written so well, I thought it was real at first, I even forgot about the "this is a short story at the top" and googled Aaron's different betting websites
sarreph · 2026-08-25 18:57:51 UTC
Thank you, very kind of you to say!
corndoge · 2026-08-25 18:01:55 UTC
I like it because each individual piece can happen and we probably all know people by now that have some aspect of Aaron - massive AI use, or into prediction markets, or live streaming, or just a friend who we have learned over time lacks scruples, or have watched them fade in response to life's challenges. The combination of all of these is then easy to imagine and that idea makes a good story.
sarreph · 2026-08-25 18:59:26 UTC
Thank you for reading it!
andai · 2026-08-25 18:10:44 UTC
> I thought Aaron’s credits would run out and that would be the end of it: he would finally get a job.
Upon reading these words I experienced psychic damage from the blast of concentrated ambitionlessness.
23david · 2026-08-25 18:10:47 UTC
Great short story!!
sarreph · 2026-08-25 18:55:51 UTC
Thank you!
JohnMakin · 2026-08-25 18:21:52 UTC
I think this short story resonates because probably most people know an Aaron - the type that is incessantly looking for some kind of scheme, some kind of get rich quick thing, and will spend exponentially far more effort and misery suffered avoiding real employment than it would take actually just sucking it up and working, and often (usually) with much, much worse results. Yet they persist. A few of them become successful founders, probably, depending on their background. But most don't.
JohnMakin · 2026-08-25 18:38:31 UTC
When I was around that age, my Aaron was this kid who matched a similar description, very bright but utterly averse to any kind of work whatsoever, never finished his education, did okay in school but underperformed a lot.
I remember a few of his dumbest schemes - one, he would get gift visa cards, run the balance down to pennies, then as a restaurant server for some crappy chain, would charge a customer with a big tip, put it on the drained card, and due to some weird quirk with the way they processed tips back then, the money would hit his paycheck before the decline would happen. I pointed out it was stupid easy to get caught by the bank and his restaurant but he insisted it was genius and foolproof. Got caught in a month or two, fired, nearly got in a lot of legal trouble but somehow got out of it.
His all time dumbest 'scheme' was when a major automaker was going into bankruptcy at some point during the financial crisis, the stock was pennies. So he invested all his savings, some thousands of dollars, into buying the stocks. Even being so young and barely financially literate at that point I was aghast, tried to explain that when the bankruptcy finishes, his stock will be worth nothing. No, no, he assured me - imagine - this stock was $20 before, when it's $20 again I'll be a gazillionaire. I tried very very hard to convince him that was not correct and of course he lost everything. Shortly after he got into dealing marijuana but by that point I had determined he wasn't worth hanging out with anymore. No idea what happened to him.
tyre · 2026-08-25 18:41:24 UTC
What’s funny is that there was a bankrupt auto company that was memed back into existence. Hertz, by all logic, was absolutely doomed. Retail traders brought it back from near-certain liquidation and could have made a ton of money. Not sure how many actually sold.
JohnMakin · 2026-08-25 18:51:19 UTC
This was GM and as I roughly remember it there was no chance of this happening, because they just formed a new company and issued new stock after bankruptcy. Maybe hard for a young person at that time to understand, and the SEC probably shouldn't have allowed trading by the point he got into it, but it was all over the news and google was in its hayday, the information was easily available.
xp84 · 2026-08-25 19:52:53 UTC
That's a shame to hear about - Hertz is one of the shittiest companies I know. It would have been great for the world if they had been liqudated!
HappySweeney · 2026-08-25 20:51:19 UTC
They saved themselves by reporting rented cars as stolen and having them towed back to the lot so they could double-dip.
satvikpendem · 2026-08-26 01:02:45 UTC
I wonder how he'd have fared in the 2021 meme stock era, no doubt talking about how we still need to HODL and his apr diamond hands strong.
Krei-se · 2026-08-25 20:59:53 UTC
Don't listen to the quitters here kids, go chase your dream, it's worth it. Employment is just helping someone else reach theirs for a pat on the back.
You can do it, be resilient and stubborn, go against the grain and things start to work out.
margalabargala · 2026-08-25 23:54:20 UTC
This is bad advice to give. It sets a lot of people up for failure with unreasonable expectations.
The correct advice to give is "don't do it. It's really hard and you'll probably fail".
Anyone who quits after receiving that advice was never going to make it anyway.
trompetenaccoun · 2026-08-26 00:47:23 UTC
"Most people fail, so better don't even try."
Is this genuinely the advice you'd give to someone who's less experienced in life? No wonder society is the way it is, most people have extremely low ambitions and then don't even bother working on those.
AnimalMuppet · 2026-08-26 00:51:54 UTC
I think you're ignoring the GP's last paragraph.
Maybe an intermediate position is to say, "Before you attempt to beat the odds, make sure you can survive the odds beating you." Because the odds are, they will.
trompetenaccoun · 2026-08-26 00:59:53 UTC
This is more of a question of personal philosophy/mindset, not logic. When you set yourself (or someone else) up for failure you've already failed and at that point there's nothing one can do. If you don't believe you can do something you won't do it. It's a loser's mindset. At the bare minimum you have to believe in yourself to be able to do things, no one else is going to do them for you.
austhrow743 · 2026-08-26 01:56:07 UTC
Right, and if someone doesn't have the loser's mindset then reading "it's hard to beat the odds, don't try" wont deter them. So there's no loss there. It might deter someone with the loser's mindset though, and given that they weren't going to make it anyway if you knock them off track early then that's a benefit.
Tade0 · 2026-08-26 10:17:48 UTC
Yeah. "My" Aaron, the last time we were in touch, was going in and out of Ukraine, transporting supplies between Russian bombardments.
People deterred by someone else's words usually internally hesitated anyway.
JohnMakin · 2026-08-27 17:59:06 UTC
We're speaking in the context of getting steady employment vs taking a very unlikely to succeed moonshot.
Plenty of extremely successful people, including plenty of billionaires, started out with a paycheck with an employer, often for many many years. Plenty more live very comfortable lives. Your framing as the former is somehow "lacking ambition" is just wrong.
Krei-se · 2026-08-26 19:36:22 UTC
I like your take on this, thanks and it's totally the line i heard haha
JohnMakin · 2026-08-26 00:34:42 UTC
quitters dont generally make careers or stable jobs for themselves. you can rage against the man all you want, as long as you dont delude yourself into thinking you’ll ever be invited to the table or do anything but contribute to the status quo anyway. unless you went to a handful of schools and attended a handful of fraternities. cynical? yes, but that doesnt mean it isnt true. the proof is the overwhelming number of founders fail, even in hype markets.
everyone has their own status quos and goals.
ekianjo · 2026-08-26 03:32:41 UTC
yeah go buy lottery tickets kids instead of investing your time and money into something predictable
Shocka1 · 2026-08-26 14:00:07 UTC
Very black and white here - a person can easily do both by making a great living and working on side projects/dreams. Someday if the side hustle takes off, maybe even give great opportunities to others to have employment. And give them much more than a pat on the back, or whatever it is you are saying.
shimman · 2026-08-25 18:29:23 UTC
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Shut up and Dance."
Great story and creating the character Aaron. You did an excellent job in making a very believable person that I think most of us have run into in tech adjacent spaces.
sarreph · 2026-08-25 18:57:13 UTC
I appreciate you referencing Charlie Brooker as he is undoubtedly a subconscious influence on my writing! Thanks for your comment.
whiteblossom · 2026-08-25 18:29:41 UTC
Thank you for this piece! I'll be thinking about Aaron during lunch today.
sarreph · 2026-08-25 18:57:24 UTC
Thank you for your kind words.
unglaublich · 2026-08-25 19:05:43 UTC
Hey you don't have to reply to each comment with a generic reply. It's a fine piece sure but let's not inflate this thread x2 with just "thank you for your words".
dang · 2026-08-27 01:14:43 UTC
I appreciate your watching out for the quality of Hacker News! but on this point we go by what pg said way back in 2009:
Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
It's not that what you said was wrong, it's just that the global optimum is best served by letting good feelings be shared, even when there isn't much cognitive content. Basically, HN does fine when cortex and heart are in approximately equal balance.
There's a difference between intelligent and smart, the latter including being able to use your intelligence for a practical, real-life purpose, like improving your own life.
cute_boi · 2026-08-25 20:09:31 UTC
I think he is smart and intelligent but lacks wisdom.
Fantastic writing, very well done. Every small, incremental decision is believable. You can see how the psychosis evolves.
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
sarreph · 2026-08-25 18:58:13 UTC
Thank you for your kind words!
john_strinlai · 2026-08-25 18:56:44 UTC
from your first post, a couple of days ago:
>What I'm saying is: that the sum total of blog posts I have actually published (for myself, not for work) is zero.
thanks for publishing this story. it kept me hooked throughout. i hope you continue to publish more.
sarreph · 2026-08-25 18:58:49 UTC
Ah - thanks! I aim to keep it up!
sarreph · 2026-08-25 19:02:55 UTC
OP here - longtime HN user. I submitted this story to a writing contest a few months back, but didn’t hear anything from them.
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
suriyaG · 2026-08-25 19:09:55 UTC
This is incredibly well written had me hooked till the end (probably because I thought it was a real life incident. :)
madradavid · 2026-08-25 19:11:21 UTC
My god, for a minute there I thought this was real..
This resonates, I bet a number of us know or Are an “Aaron”.
Thanks for this.
xp84 · 2026-08-25 19:55:44 UTC
I'll admit, I was really hoping the end was going to be like, "And that's how Aaron Kalshi created a £XX billion company."
raajg · 2026-08-25 20:11:03 UTC
THIS!
archon810 · 2026-08-26 06:22:36 UTC
I thought it was going to be about Aaron Swartz.
altilunium · 2026-08-26 09:40:30 UTC
I immediately noticed something was wrong when the "daily tech message board" appeared. Before that point, I 100% believed that this was a real story.
suprfnk · 2026-08-25 19:21:26 UTC
Very well written! I haven't read such a long piece on the internet for quite a while but this hooked me immediately, and kept me hooked.
Breath of fresh air between all the AI """writing""".
mikestorrent · 2026-08-26 00:38:12 UTC
It so was. It's amazing how easily we can all tell what's written by a real person these days. It's gotta be like the early days of CGI.... ten years from now it'll be so hard to tell :(
Thanks OP, great read
jimbob45 · 2026-08-25 19:31:14 UTC
Why make him #5 in WoW of all games? Arena has never been that prestigious and most players primarily engaged in PvE rather than PvP, which didn’t have such rankings.
djriley · 2026-08-25 20:19:39 UTC
Aaron seems like the kind of guy who would sink a ton of time in to something so meaningless now, doesn't he?
noman-land · 2026-08-25 21:29:32 UTC
He was #6.
brailsafe · 2026-08-26 06:42:22 UTC
PvE didn't necessarily have formal individual rankings at that time, but it sort of does now.
PvP was a perfectly legit thing to be sweaty about ranking in. I had about 3 friends who were in some of the top rankings for their battlegroup for their classes.
BrunoBernardino · 2026-08-25 19:48:05 UTC
Congratulations! As someone who's written (micro and short) fiction for many years, I _feel_ how hard it is to get someone to read it. Enjoy it!
xp84 · 2026-08-25 19:50:07 UTC
You're a great writer. I haven't read a lot recently, but this was the type of story that I really could not stop reading.
I also didn't see that it said "This is a short story" at the top, so I read more than half thinking it was nonfiction. Heh.
apt-apt-apt-apt · 2026-08-26 05:33:15 UTC
Wish I had known it was fiction – read half of it thinking it was real.
sarreph · 2026-08-26 13:28:42 UTC
Very kind of you to say.
Also see a lot of comments echoing your point about missing the fact that it was fiction... Next post might have a stronger disclaimer! (But I fear it actually worked in my favour here)
acorn221 · 2026-08-26 14:23:41 UTC
Damn Rory, I didn't know you wrote fiction! Nice work here
sarreph · 2026-08-26 22:50:23 UTC
Ah cheers, James!
jfil · 2026-08-26 22:31:40 UTC
I suggest you keep it quizzical - that little not-knowing is like spice in a recipe.
I wonder if it was AM's writing contest. Your writing is great, keep going.
herbertl · 2026-08-25 20:07:24 UTC
I really enjoyed this! Thank you for writing and sharing.
raajg · 2026-08-25 20:10:40 UTC
Couldn't stop reading! It's been an embarrassingly long amount of time since I got hooked to something like this. Keep going!
sgt101 · 2026-08-25 20:22:23 UTC
Good story, write more. You have a good NO AI style.
thevivekshukla · 2026-08-25 20:24:17 UTC
Good story. I was hooked.
Mistletoe · 2026-08-25 21:09:39 UTC
You write wonderfully, direct, heartfelt, human, real, the opposite of LLM output, and that’s the highest honor I can bestow.
chknkachunga · 2026-08-25 22:47:09 UTC
Superb storytelling. Thank you. This was fantastic.
emadabdulrahim · 2026-08-26 03:19:30 UTC
This reads so well I was supposed to go out for a workout but I couldn't stop until I finished it.
Incredibly engaging yet simple writing that flows well.
fastidiousangle · 2026-08-26 06:12:53 UTC
fantastic - well done, couldn't stop reading!
nicbou · 2026-08-26 08:42:34 UTC
I love your website. The lists page is a brilliant idea and I might steal it from you. Human curation is such a luxury.
sarreph · 2026-08-26 22:58:24 UTC
> The lists page is a brilliant idea and I might steal it from you.
You should! Tom MacWright's website[0] was a big influence on the design of my site. I especially took inspiration from how they structure their reading list and how I could apply that to more abstract objects that I wanted to document.
I actually had to look up "Come bet on Aaron’s life with us" to make sure it wasn't real.
I also liked your WhatWeSee art exhibition, pretty interesting concept.
sarreph · 2026-08-26 22:52:48 UTC
> I actually had to look up "Come bet on Aaron’s life with us" to make sure it wasn't real.
Another commenter suggested I could have made a parody site / post -- maybe an idea for next time...
> I also liked your WhatWeSee art exhibition, pretty interesting concept.
That's kind of you. I've been experimenting a lot recently with getting agents to make art, and the results are certainly interesting!
kiq · 2026-08-26 09:02:42 UTC
great story. thank you for sharing, it perfectly captures whats going on right now with betting apps...
chrisjj · 2026-08-26 09:20:56 UTC
Well done! Looking forward to your next.
gwbas1c · 2026-08-26 13:29:57 UTC
I enjoyed the story!
Opinion
The ending is quite abrupt, I'd consider another short scene. Perhaps one at Aaron's funeral where there's a little more exposition about the shooter, such as with a conversation with Aaron's mom, or with the wider group of friends. For example, we don't know if the bet was paid out, or if the bettor had some relationship to the shooter.
The shooting itself could have a bit more conflict and tension. Imagine if, for example, there was some kind of animosity due to a fight between Aaron and the narrator. (Instead of them drifting apart.) Then imagine that the narrator saw the bet before the race, saw someone suspicious, put two and two together, and tried to warn Aaron?
Anyway, great story!
JKCalhoun · 2026-08-26 14:20:28 UTC
"The ending is quite abrupt"
As was the ending of the young man's life.
It works perfectly as is. Often in life there is no denouement.
Mr_Eri_Atlov · 2026-08-25 19:13:12 UTC
Great story; it's amazing how many of us sympathize with or have had an Aaron in our lives.
Comments
Even thinking/writing about this now, it still makes obvious sense and I'm surprised it hasn't been seriously made yet with crypto: if there's a pot of billions, contributed to by millions, the incentive becomes not just about the money, but the adoration, protection and power that would come with doing so many people a favour.
But these problems would likely be self-resolving in most cases as the crypto pot owner would simply rug-pull everyone.
>rhythmically ejected spurts of bright red blood
Yeah man, like in music, synesthesia, I get you.
Unsurprisingly the author also makes music: https://rorz.io/music
One of his songs is called "Do androids dream of real sheep?"
What a fresh take on that classic quote! Made me spurt my kombucha, lol.
How can someone be SO talented. Thanks for sharing.
P.S. - I didn’t use LLMs to write it, no! :)
Upon reading these words I experienced psychic damage from the blast of concentrated ambitionlessness.
I remember a few of his dumbest schemes - one, he would get gift visa cards, run the balance down to pennies, then as a restaurant server for some crappy chain, would charge a customer with a big tip, put it on the drained card, and due to some weird quirk with the way they processed tips back then, the money would hit his paycheck before the decline would happen. I pointed out it was stupid easy to get caught by the bank and his restaurant but he insisted it was genius and foolproof. Got caught in a month or two, fired, nearly got in a lot of legal trouble but somehow got out of it.
His all time dumbest 'scheme' was when a major automaker was going into bankruptcy at some point during the financial crisis, the stock was pennies. So he invested all his savings, some thousands of dollars, into buying the stocks. Even being so young and barely financially literate at that point I was aghast, tried to explain that when the bankruptcy finishes, his stock will be worth nothing. No, no, he assured me - imagine - this stock was $20 before, when it's $20 again I'll be a gazillionaire. I tried very very hard to convince him that was not correct and of course he lost everything. Shortly after he got into dealing marijuana but by that point I had determined he wasn't worth hanging out with anymore. No idea what happened to him.
You can do it, be resilient and stubborn, go against the grain and things start to work out.
The correct advice to give is "don't do it. It's really hard and you'll probably fail".
Anyone who quits after receiving that advice was never going to make it anyway.
Is this genuinely the advice you'd give to someone who's less experienced in life? No wonder society is the way it is, most people have extremely low ambitions and then don't even bother working on those.
Maybe an intermediate position is to say, "Before you attempt to beat the odds, make sure you can survive the odds beating you." Because the odds are, they will.
People deterred by someone else's words usually internally hesitated anyway.
Plenty of extremely successful people, including plenty of billionaires, started out with a paycheck with an employer, often for many many years. Plenty more live very comfortable lives. Your framing as the former is somehow "lacking ambition" is just wrong.
everyone has their own status quos and goals.
Great story and creating the character Aaron. You did an excellent job in making a very believable person that I think most of us have run into in tech adjacent spaces.
Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
It's not that what you said was wrong, it's just that the global optimum is best served by letting good feelings be shared, even when there isn't much cognitive content. Basically, HN does fine when cortex and heart are in approximately equal balance.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20090206141746/http://www.ycombi...
(Ref: https://www.quotes.net/mquote/3799 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkoPq5AOCOA )
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
>What I'm saying is: that the sum total of blog posts I have actually published (for myself, not for work) is zero.
thanks for publishing this story. it kept me hooked throughout. i hope you continue to publish more.
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
Breath of fresh air between all the AI """writing""".
Thanks OP, great read
PvP was a perfectly legit thing to be sweaty about ranking in. I had about 3 friends who were in some of the top rankings for their battlegroup for their classes.
I also didn't see that it said "This is a short story" at the top, so I read more than half thinking it was nonfiction. Heh.
Also see a lot of comments echoing your point about missing the fact that it was fiction... Next post might have a stronger disclaimer! (But I fear it actually worked in my favour here)
I wonder if it was AM's writing contest. Your writing is great, keep going.
You should! Tom MacWright's website[0] was a big influence on the design of my site. I especially took inspiration from how they structure their reading list and how I could apply that to more abstract objects that I wanted to document.
[0] - https://macwright.com/
I actually had to look up "Come bet on Aaron’s life with us" to make sure it wasn't real.
I also liked your WhatWeSee art exhibition, pretty interesting concept.
Another commenter suggested I could have made a parody site / post -- maybe an idea for next time...
> I also liked your WhatWeSee art exhibition, pretty interesting concept.
That's kind of you. I've been experimenting a lot recently with getting agents to make art, and the results are certainly interesting!
Opinion
The ending is quite abrupt, I'd consider another short scene. Perhaps one at Aaron's funeral where there's a little more exposition about the shooter, such as with a conversation with Aaron's mom, or with the wider group of friends. For example, we don't know if the bet was paid out, or if the bettor had some relationship to the shooter.
The shooting itself could have a bit more conflict and tension. Imagine if, for example, there was some kind of animosity due to a fight between Aaron and the narrator. (Instead of them drifting apart.) Then imagine that the narrator saw the bet before the race, saw someone suspicious, put two and two together, and tried to warn Aaron?
Anyway, great story!
As was the ending of the young man's life.
It works perfectly as is. Often in life there is no denouement.