The Boy Kings

Conversations faded in and out, rising and falling in intensity depending on the participants’ interest, with an impunity that would be considered rude in real life.
    I quickly learned to ignore most of the random messages from guys in the office—they were just sending out a quick ping to see if I was clueless enough to accept a date from someone who could easily be asking the same thing of twenty other girls at the same time. I paid attention to instant messages from Thrax, though, because we were friends. “I just saw that there’s a shower room on the third floor that has shampoo and towels; it’s well-equipped,” I typed to Thrax at work one day and he answered, with a suggestive non sequitur, “Yes, yes, I am,” and I thought, “Did he just say that at work? Are we awkward, hormonal teenagers or coworkers?” I guessed that, symbolically at least, we were both. Instant messaging, like everything we were building, was a way to play without consequences, the adult-proof playground of the digital age.
    At the end of that first summer, the office was a focused hum of work, punctuated by the usual happy hours and periods of playtime. Engineers were preparing to launch News Feed in September, and in customer support we were doing our routine work of answering emails while also helping out with feedback and testing for the new feature. I had received a tiny promotion to senior customer-support rep and an even tinier raise, at fifty cents more than my previous hourly wage.
    As we were getting ready to move out of the pool house, Thrax instant messaged me that he and Sam were going to Las Vegas for the yearly hacking convention called Defcon. “You can come if you want,” he typed, and I did. Not just because I liked them and our indie-ish little crew but because, as fun as working at Facebook was, there was a freedom in being somewhere else. When we arrived in Las Vegas, despite the fact that we were in the fakest city in the world, at a convention dedicated to being so far inside a computer that you can break it and everything it is linked to, for three days everything felt real.
    It was Sam and Thrax’s first visit, but I had fallen in love with Vegas years ago. In high school, my youth orchestra had done an exchange with the Las Vegas youth orchestra and we spent three days touring the hot Nevada desert, staring big-eyed at the towering houses of money and sex that dot the landscape. On the last day, we finally toured the famous Strip, which was less populated in the 1990s but no less grand. Perhaps it was grander then for being less dense, with casinos spaced widely apart, rising from the desert like Arabian castles. From where I sat on our orchestra’s tour bus, I saw nothing against the horizon but a perfectly sun bleached, gold-accented acropolis with pillars asstaunch and august as those in Rome, only brighter, bone-white against the nuclear blue sky. Our bus driver told us over the PA that Caesars Palace lacks an apostrophe because, “At Caesars, everyone is king.” Taking in that man-made immensity from my shaded perch on the bus as a teenager, I had a sudden, chilling feeling that I, too, could be king.
    Perhaps this is the feeling Las Vegas is designed to inspire; against the backdrop of the strip’s perfect strangeness anything you could imagine seemed possible. This is its, and America’s, promise. This is what makes it all okay. “This is America, you live in it, you let it happen,” Thomas Pynchon wrote in a novel about the creation of a revolutionary underground mail system. “Let it unfurl.”
    On this second trip, at the height of the real-estate bubble, it felt like America was unfurling grandly: I was at an underground hacker convention with a gay programmer from M.I.T. and a glorified college dropout from Georgia. And we were having fun. Under the neon, away from the fishbowl of the Facebook office, where, at any time, twenty Harvard computer bros were gossiping on AIM, imagining they could track everyone’s every move, we were free. Las Vegas was too big, too fake, too glittering to let anyone in it be tracked by the cool blue frame of Facebook.
    “We should have stayed at the Wynn,” I told Thrax and Sam when I noticed that the administrative assistant had booked them a room at the Riviera, one of the oldest casinos on the strip, with the thin, quilted, flower-print bedspreads to prove it. As soon as I mentioned the Wynn, though, I almost wished I hadn’t. It would be