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By 1992 the family had scraped enough money together to send Renu to London, where his aunt and uncle lived.

His new life on the other side of the world, in a most unfamiliar setting, contained its own dangers. At the Langdon School – one of the biggest and most unruly in east London – Renu, stick-thin and small, found himself caught between two large communities, one white and one Bengali. He performed well in maths, outstripping all his peers, but was barely able to express himself in English. A complete outsider, he was bullied relentlessly and after six months simply refused to attend classes any more, despite the entreaties of his despairing aunt and uncle.

For two years Renu locked himself inside the house, sometimes not emerging into the fresh air for weeks on end. Watching television from morning till night was his sole activity.

Renukanth Subramaniam learned how to be alone.

And he might have stayed alone, had his uncle not finally forced him back into the outside world, specifically to Newham College of Further Education. Here he learned some new skills: how to socialise with his peers; how to smoke marijuana; how to drink Martell brandy; and how to programme a computer.

Down at the local pub, stoned and drunk, Renu would hammer his virtual opponents on the arcade machine, Street Fighter. How many young men were drawn obsessively to this mesmerically repetitive challenge, which pitched their avatar in a fight to the death against a string of equally aggressive fighters? Did this tame aggression or encourage it? Did the flood of dopamine around the brain’s frontal lobe, which these games trigger, lead to intense addiction in all young men or just in some of them?

Renu pounded away at the machine, drenching his body in adrenalin and his brain in endorphins. When he finished, his body still wired, he hit the Martell to sustain a feeling of well-being and to calm himself down. Slowly, this dual habit began to take its toll on his paltry allowance. Street Fighter became ever more central to his life. As he lay down to sleep, the game’s violent images would appear in technicolour in his mind’s eye.

As he had once stopped gambling, so he now resolved to stop playing and he never touched the machine again. Unfortunately, his decision at the time only applied to Street Fighter, and not to his burgeoning predilection for drink and drugs.

His break with the game did not mean an end to his fascination with computers in general. He had loved them ever since he had first played with one as a nine-year-old in Sri Lanka. Lack of money had ensured he never had regular access, but he overcame that problem in his early twenties by accepting a place to study computer science at London’s Westminster University.

Soon afterwards Renu had discovered warez, pirated software programs whose security systems had been cracked and distributed among devotees known collectively as The Scene.

It was a world where he could be with friends and alone, at one and the same time.

10

GAME THEORY

Eislingen, Baden-Württemberg, 2001

Just as Renu was exploring The Scene for the first time, 500 miles away in southern Germany another young computer user had stumbled across the same mysterious community.

Fifteen-year-old Matrix001 had fallen in love. Not with a girl. Matrix was infatuated with computer games. At first, they were just one aspect in a balanced and normal adolescence, competing for his spare time with gymnastics and the school orchestra in which he played the clarinet. There was nothing outwardly unusual about him. His secret obsession with games was easily hidden. Nobody knew – not his friends, not his parents or his siblings – except perhaps for his younger brother.

Not only did he adore games, but he was a skilled practitioner too, and as his final high-school exams approached, his sessions at the keyboard began to extend deep into the night. Keeping up with the latest games proved an expensive affair, especially if (as among Matrix’s gaming peer group) there was kudos in announcing