long stream of paper, perforated on either side for the blunt teeth of the plastic gears that would catch it and pull it through. The printer head jolted back and forth and the machine rocked with the effort of churning out 148 pages of source code for Realms of Gold I: Tomb of Destiny.
Simon fit the entire slab into a three-ring binder—the largest kind, with rings that could have fit around his upper arm. He snapped them shut with the nervous gravity of a man carrying nuclear authorization codes. It was the Codex of the Realms, and it felt weighty and dangerous, less like code and more like the warhead itself.
Darren’s father drove the four of us up to computer camp on the last Monday of June. The station wagon pulled up in front of the Bertuccis’ and Simon came out, waving good-bye to his mother inside and running to the curb. We pulled out and onto I-90 for the long quiet drive west, the road bordered with pine forest and fast-growing high-tech office parks, buildings with shiny black glass and no signage, computer start-ups and defense contractors. Darren’s dad worked at one of those contractors, doing he couldn’t say what sort of work on Cold War initiatives. He was tall, red-faced, an aging athlete who didn’t pretend to understand what the four of us were up to. He made awkward small talk with Simon, asking after his parents, his grades, before falling silent.
It was almost noon by the time we turned off onto a single-lane road that wound for miles with no houses on either side, just pine trees. Mr. Ackerman missed the turn and doubled back to turn in at a dirt road with a pink construction-paper sign stapled to a tree, just KIDBITS in black Sharpie and an arrow. The road gave out at a circular drive before a two-story brick building with slightly dirty white trim. The main building (called Main) was a boarding school most of the year, rented out for the summer.
About forty boys and eighteen girls were collecting in and around the building, each orbited by one or two parents, unglamorous fortysomethings who had an air of competitiveness and also a shared, head-shaking embarrassment. They were the parents of computer geeks without knowing what that meant.
Neither did any one of us, quite. It was a deeply peculiar moment, the teenage geeks of the personal computer era emerging from CRT-lit curtained bedrooms to behold each other for the first time. To see ourselves as a strange, incipiently powerful cohort. And it wasn’t so much the way we looked—there were plenty of soft bodies, T-shirts, and bowl-cut hair, but there were also more than a few would-be tough kids. The girls were alert and conservatively dressed, most of them used to passing unnoticed at the back of the class. A few of them towered over the tinier late-blooming boys. There were angry nerds, frightened nerds, nerds that didn’t know yet they were nerds.
It might have been the eyes; quick eyes, with a way of focusing then looking away. We’d all discovered the same things privately and were meeting for the first time, like a meeting of UFO abductees. Moments of eye contact seemed to have a stealthy tentative question there, something like, “Do you think this is as important as I think it is?” Which at some point changed to “Can you believe they’re really letting us do this?” and “When do you think our parents are going to leave?” It wasn’t the first time in history that nerd was meeting nerd, but it was the first time for us, our cohort—the first nerds of the modem age, floppy-disk drives, game consoles, Apple IIs, and C64s—and we were different.
A cheerful, overweight man sweating in the heat handed out thick orientation packets, a manila folder with a name handwritten on the front. “Welcome to KidBits,” he said. The folder held a medical release form; a personal information sheet to check. A room key, taped to a map of the dorm with a room circled. A map of the area. There were a few stapled pages of orientation information; curfew and lights-out times. We’d be doing swimming lessons and outdoor sports, the camp regimen from time immemorial—hiking, tennis, soccer. And computers.
After dinner, most of the campers sat on the front steps below the entrance to the dorm long after quiet hour, a few boldly smoking cigarettes. I looked out through the screen door, breathing the warm air.