Taylor was an average human.

Physically speaking, that is. There was nothing outwardly unique about him, and that's how he liked it. He tended to mesh with any crowd, not drawing any unnecessary attention. Internally however, he was quite different from his peers. He's always known it, too - even at an early age he could solve problems faster and more efficiently, picked up on new material with ease, and was just... somehow better. His teachers called him gifted, and he saw no reason to disagree, but he was also humble about it. Like any other skill, he learned to use it to his advantage without making a big deal of it.

That is, until around his seventeenth year when it suddenly hit him. What the hell are these people doing?

His instructor was handing back test results. Trying his hardest to be inconspicuous, he stole glances around the room, catching sight of the other students' mediocre grades. Staring down at his 99%, he silently cursed. The problem he answered incorrectly was a simple rounding error, one that he wouldn't have made had he taken the extra three seconds to double check his work. He had been in such a rush to hand the test in first that his work had suffered, costing him a perfect score. Still, he found amusement in it. Around him sat those who studied while he played games on the computer. Before that, they were the ones taking notes off the board while he absent-mindedly doodled in his notebook. They were the ones that spent several hours meticulously completing their homework while he blasted through it on the bus the morning it was due, an art he'd been perfecting for years (a remarkable feat, given the bumpy roads his bus had to travel on)

Yet there he sat with the best grade in the class, a grade earned effortlessly. So, again, what the hell are these people doing? It can't truly be this difficult, can it?

He quickly grew bored with this. All of it. Considering how many years of high school he had to put up with, the diploma was - or rather would be - barely worth the paper it was printed on. He had some older friends that had graduated last year who still couldn't manage to get a job no matter how hard they tried. Nobody wanted to hire a high school graduate, and colleges always want more extracurricular activities, to the point of being utterly absurd about it.

Taylor became acutely aware that he would have to sacrifice his youth on the altar of higher education to get anywhere in this society. The very idea was sickening, to throw away all that's good in life to get a slightly less horrible job. Something inside him snapped, and he chose to rebel against that life.

Over the course of the next few years, his grades slipped, or rather plummeted. He stopped caring about them entirely. While attendance was mandatory, that fact never stopped him when you really wanted to skip a day (or six), so he went when he felt like it, but participation was something they could never force. If they tried, he resisted, and it drove them mad. There were numerous discussions about him throwing away his future and wasting potential. None of it seemed to make an impression. They tried to punish him by giving him detention, which he blew off. They punished that by suspending him from school, which at one point he actually thanked them for (they were not amused). He was glad to have a get-out-of-school-free card. More time for reading, playing games, and spending time in solitude.

Taylor became the bane of all his instructors - try as they might, they couldn't convince him that any of this was important. He liked to think that it was out of pride - or at least a genuine desire to help - that they tried so hard to rally him, to strike the proper angle to make him come around. But he built up his walls, strengthened his resolve, and learned to ignore them. After all, he wasn't exactly lacking in mental fortitude. It became trivial to dismiss their efforts to coax him back into the herd.

That's exactly what it was, too. A herd. Mindless livestock just doing what they're told. The whole institution was a damn assembly line for a passive, obedient, subservient citizenry. Just smart enough to run the machines, but not smart enough to realize they had been getting completely screwed all their life.

Voluntary lifelong servitude to an authority that couldn't care less about you? For the third time, what the hell are these people doing!?

Years passed, and he became a dropout with a GED just as worthless as the high school diploma he turned up his nose at, but he was enjoying himself. Despite the negatives in his life that arose from his bad decisions, he was still feeling pretty good, believing that one's life doesn't have to be glorious and extravagant to be enjoyable, and was perfectly content with what he had.

He sat down at his computer to watch some My Little Pony on Youtube.

"Because that's where the cool kids go to watch ponies," he said to himself.

With a drink in hand, he jumped right into the new episode. Pinkie Pie was babysitting and he couldn't wait to see what kind of shenanigans was about to go down.

Suddenly, he began to feel sick, and the room appeared to spin. He tried to stand, but didn't even make it two steps before he lost his balance and fell. He winced, waiting for the pain as he hit he floor, but there was none.

He opened his eyes to find he was no longer in his own room...