Jon came home that day with an unusual energy. With literally limitless options right at his fingertips, the insignificance of most people's lives came suddenly into stark relief.
His mom was an accountant with several local businesses as clients, but if she were to disappear one day, another accountant would just fill in that vacuum. His dad worked at a fish processing plant, and he'd certainly worked his way up from the slime line into management, and was important for his particular facility. But even then, if his dad didn't exist, someone else would have worked their way into that position.
Everyone Jon knew was basically insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and for a teenager that felt... hopeless. Even Sarah McMillan's dad, the millionaire who owned a tech company, really didn't make a huge difference to the world. He'd made all of his money by developing phone apps that were knock-offs of games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds, and never really made anything original. He just knew what to copy. There were hundreds of other companies out there doing basically the same thing.
So if the richest, most important person Jon had ever met was so replaceable, so small from the world scale, what hope did Jon ever have of really making a difference? Truly making a difference?
Yeah, sure, his mom and dad were important to him, but was everyone just destined to be grains of sand caught up in a stream, with no control over where they were tossed in the current? Did everyone just get pulled up from the sand bed for a short while, just to be deposited back down a little ways down the river? Was that the life that was ahead of him?
No. It wasn't. Because Jon had a wishing stone. So he held it up: "I wish I was destined to do something important, something that truly makes a difference to the world."
There was a flash, and a wave of dizziness overcame Jon. He managed to stumble over to his bed and get himself under the covers before losing consciousness completely.
