Before he was called a patriot and a traitor for following Elon Musk to Washington to join DOGE; before he was hired by the US government despite a résumé that would have been previously rejected; before he was granted extensive access to sensitive data and invited to brief the country’s vice president; before he met his Twitter heroes in Silicon Valley; before he became a Thiel Fellow, which required him to become a college dropout; before he was celebrated internationally for using AI to help detect passages in a scroll charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius; before all of that, Luke Farritor, now 23, was a homeschooled kid in Lincoln, Nebraska, who called himself lukethecoder64.

Back then, he responded to the prompt “You Know You’re a Nerd When…” with “you listen to ‘White ’n nerdy’ by Weird Al and think it’s a biography of you.” The Martian was one of his favorite books. He was a bell ringer at church. He played piano and golf, chess and Kerbal Space Program. During his high school summers, he helped build an app that could link those in need to local charities. It’s still in use.