We were hardly boys, not yet men, never girls. We were horses of another color, we were white, few of us were gay, we were boys. Sticklike bodies, heads with wings. We were smarter, and odder, than others. We grew cosseted and lonely in lonely suburbs, mystified by the rituals of bat and ball that bound the others, the realer boys. We were sensitive to noise and to changes in temperature, to rough or smooth textures, to the white ball dropping like a blind moon onto our heads where we stood dreaming in right field. We were teased mercilessly, tormented with our difference, our inability to read the room, to see and understand faces, similes, windows, souls. We read. We read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Star Trek novelizations and The Lord of the Rings. Uninhabited planets, we were good at games. We were on the spectrum before we made the spectrum cool, before it meant anything other than a means of distinguishing the frequencies of light. We covered our ears in featherlight earphones, listening to Rush, to Foreigner, to Yes. We lay in wait with our boomboxes, fingers hovering over the record button, waiting for our favorite song: why pay? Narrowly we watched our fathers leave the house, enter the house, leave it again. We adapted well to indoor environments, to indulgent or exasperated sighs. We did poorly in school, we did freakishly well in school. We were lopsided. We had urges. We walked up to people and blurted our passions for model trains, Model UN, board games, computers. We had computers before anyone else and we learned how to use them. We bent to our task, in our mother’s sewing room or our father’s office or in the basement with the light of the CRT lighting greenly our green faces. We learned to code. Girls were a pain, a literal pain, an abdominal pang that we covered with one hand. We bent to our task. We dropped out of Harvard, Stanford, MIT. We went into rooms, came out of rooms. We wrote programs, apps, business plans, we studied finance, we never stopped playing games. We saw that human life was a game and that the rules were arbitrary and unfair. We loved and hated rules. We made our first million, our first ten million. People opened their wallets to us and discovered they had handed us their hearts. We built the algorithm. The algorithm is a rule to break up rules with, a law unto itself. The villainy you teach us we shall execute, and it shall go hard with them. We went hard. The lords and owners of their faces. We hardened our bodies out of hatred, we hardened our minds out of love for the generations to come, for humanity, for the algorithm. We were pirates, hackers, disruptors. We read The Lord of the Rings again. We fed our flying heads. We liked to fly. We flew in private jets but it wasn’t what we wanted; we wanted flying cars and starship and to boldly go where no man had gone before. No man. We made our first billion, our second, our third. We decided to save humanity from itself—its meanness, its pettiness, its ignorance, its democracy. We opened our checkbooks, we supported certain candidates, we sponsored certain initiatives, we endowed certain foundations. Our hearts were black boxes, like everyone’s: garbage in garbage out. What you see is what you get. We railed against the others, their colossal stupidity, their utter blindness. Nothing has changed since the ball was a white tooth in the sky, nothing has changed since we dreamed its fall. We deplored inefficiency as we deplored death. We privatized the space program, flew to low earth orbit, watched the blue marble revolve and skitter, returned to it inevitably with nameless pain. We bought land in New Zealand and in Montana. We discarded wives. We sired many children. We built bunkers, bought yachts, spent as much time as possible in transit, out of touch. Our footprint was vast. We were photographed with the mothers of our babies, women who understood us, too well. We wondered if anyone ever had or could love us. We bent to our task, the white skull, falling. We deplored ignorance. We reread The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we reread The Lord of the Rings. Don’t panic, don’t be evil, don’t die. We took supplements, we went paleo, we invested in cloning and cryonics. We permitted rumors to circulate of others’ blood absorbed by our bodies. Vessels of mind. We hoarded resources on behalf of mankind as it ought to be, not mankind as it was. Socrates is mortal—so saith the syllogism—but why us? Why can’t we live forever with the algorithm, the algorithm that is nothing in itself but an aggregator, an amplifier, of words, money, desires? We hated the world we had made, the world that had made us in its turn. Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds. We stood in right field, dreaming summer heat, our colors white and green. The white ball falls. The jawbone of an ass. The world we made.
