The Boy Kings

wasso extreme that his limbs couldn’t register his thoughts. “It was scary,” he remembered, “it was like my body wouldn’t ever work again.”
    As the guys reminisced excitedly about the heroics of F8, congratulating themselves on their latest victory in the march to take over the world, I thought about Thrax’s story. It was as if, in the process of building out his technology, he had reached the technologists’ desired state in which he no longer had a human body. If the scene had been a video—and, for once, it was not, for there was no one there to record Thrax’s fall—Daft Punk’s “Robot Rock” would have been playing. This, maybe, was Face-book’s primal scene: The moment when technology consumed the body, reality, and what was left of the physical realm.
    Bored with F8 and Platform chatter, which was all anyone at work had talked about for months, I suggested watching The Wire . Sam agreed and Thrax quickly downloaded the first episodes of season one from one of his many pirated media sites. A few minutes later, Mark and a few friends arrived at the apartment to hang out. Mark said that he wanted to play video games and, since even at that late hour of the night he was still the boss, we let him commandeer the television in the living room for video games while Sam, Thrax, and I retreated to Thrax’s bedroom to talk. Eventually, Mark left and we wandered back out to the living room to make up songs on the electric piano.
    It was close to three in the morning when I left the living room and went to the kitchen in search of eggs. Thrax always had eggs, if nothing else, in the fridge, and it seemed like a comforting sign of a domesticity that couldn’t be coded away. I made sandwiches out of eggs and stale bread, as Thrax and Sam tinkeredin the dark on the piano. It was just us here, now, without the crowds and Mark and the blogs and the excited worship of influential Silicon Valley tech bloggers like Robert Scoble, for whom the Facebook Platform was the next great technical revolution, at least until the next exciting new application or platform came along. The only reason I knew who Scoble was, and that he had been raving about the platform, was because I was accidentally there, watching and listening to the boys that occupied the center of it. As I buttered the bread slices and slid the fried eggs onto them I wondered if the world would ever care as much about any of this—being technical, building applications, making platforms, owning platforms—as Mark and Scoble and the rest of the Valley did, and where all of this was going to lead.
    • • •
    “Are you coming to Thrax’s birthday party in Las Vegas?” Sam asked me over IM while we were both at work.
    “I can’t . . . it’s going to be like five hundred dollars for one night with airfare and the club and hotel,” I typed back.
    “Jamie says that you have to go. We need you,” Sam returned.
    “I know, but I can’t afford it. I make a third of what you guys make. If they want me to go, they’re going to have to help.”
    “Okay, I’ll talk to Jamie and see what he says,” Sam said, switching to a different AIM window to talk to Jamie.
    Later that day Sam messaged me with an answer.
    “Jamie says they’ll pay for the club. He doesn’t seem to get why, though.”
    “Ugh, I don’t get how they don’t get how rich they are compared to everyone else. It’s like they think everyone is a rich guy from Harvard.”
    “Well, what they don’t realize is that you’ll remember this.” Sam was right, just as he usually was when it came to reading the idiosyncrasies of the social world we inhabited. While I tended to observe things quietly, Sam unabashedly posted mocking witticisms on the other boys’ walls, making loving jokes of everything they held dear. This was Sam’s brand, and he could get away with it because, as an engineer, he knew they needed him. He was also gay, and cute, and being both made him an asset to others rather than a source of competition for female attention.
    “They want us around to spice things up,” Sam once said to me at a party, as if we occupied the position of some kind of self-aware court jesters. Sometimes, when we made fun of the more staid engineers, they liked it because mockery was another form of attention. Other times, they didn’t realize we were poking fun. For example, rather than remembering the names of all the latest smart-phone models that were released every week, we