Kiss Me First (3 page)

Instead, I bought everything new, from the huge Tesco Extra in Rotherhithe. I didn’t need much: a blow-up mattress and sheets, a little desk, a beanbag, a toasted-sandwich maker. I put my books in stacks against the wall, arranged by colour, and kept my clothes in bin bags: when they got dirty I put them in another bin bag, and when that was full I took it to the launderette. I was working from home anyhow, so I didn’t need to dress up. I passed the computer course easily, and began my new job for Damian, mum’s friend’s son, as soon as I had settled in to the flat. It wasn’t hard. Every few days he’d send me a link to a beta site that needed testing, and I’d run it through a quality assurance program, checking for faults and bugs and weak spots, and then send back a report. I got paid per job; most would take less than a day, but the more complicated ones might require two. After I had finished my work, I would stay on the computer, playing games or, later, posting on Red Pill. I had set up my desk next to the window and quickly realized that there was a big advantage to the restaurant sign blocking the lower half of the glass; it meant there was never any glare on my laptop screen.

Afterwards, the police kept asking me exactly what led me to Red Pill. I told them I couldn’t remember, that I just followed a random link, but of course I knew exactly how I got to it. I just didn’t want to tell them.

As I say, after moving into the flat my time playing games increased, to around eight hours a day. There was one game in particular, World of Warcraft. I suppose it was as if that was my full-time job, and I fitted my testing work around it. I enjoyed how quickly time went by when I was playing: whole afternoons were effortlessly dispensed with, like eating a doughnut in two bites. I soon reached level sixty and was invited to join a nice guild, which got together for raids two or three times a week. On several occasions I was nominated as leader, and it was during one pre-raid meeting, discussing strategy, that another player started a debate about how the decisions one took in the game revealed one’s own philosophy. For instance, whether, after a raid, you distributed the gold you personally gained amongst the other members or took it all for yourself. I hadn’t previously thought of the game in those terms and found it interesting, and he suggested that I check out this website, redpill-uk.info.
A very cool philosophy site
, he wrote.
It’ll blow your mind.
He emailed me a link to a podcast on the site by the man who ran it, Adrian Dervish.

Although I ended up listening to nearly a hundred of Adrian’s podcasts, I can remember that first one clearly. I made notes on it – I make notes on all the important things that happen – but I don’t need to look them up now. The title was
Is This a Laptop I See Before Me?
and Adrian’s opening words were, ‘So, folks, today’s question is – how much can we really know?’ He then gave a whistle-stop tour of classic epistemology, starting with Socrates and ending at
The Matrix
, which happened to be one of my favourite films. He’d pose a statement – ‘I’m 100% sure that I’m speaking into a microphone right now’ – and then say, ‘
But!
What does 100% actually mean?’ The best way I can describe it was like a never-ending game of Pass the Parcel: each idea was unwrapped to reveal another inside. I remember that as the podcast went on, he started chuckling over those ‘
But!
’s, as if this was the best fun a person could ever have.

There was something immediately compelling about Adrian’s voice. He was American, and his accent was warm and intimate. He would be saying these mind-expanding things but in a cosy way, using these quaint words like ‘folks’ and ‘gosh’. ‘This is really something to get your philosophical chops around,’ he’d say. Or, ‘If you thought that was interesting, golly, just wait till you hear what I’ve got for you next.’ After a few minutes, I stopped the podcast, got down on the floor and brought my laptop close to my head to drown out the noise on the street below, before listening to it all over again.

After that first podcast, I made myself a cheese toastie and then came back and listened to another four, back to back. As I did so, I explored the site. Its motto was ‘Choose the Truth’. The name Red Pill was another reference to
The Matrix
: the film’s characters, unaware that they are in a virtually simulated world, are invited to take either a blue pill to stay ignorant or a red pill to be faced with reality, however upsetting it might be.

I investigated the forums. In one, members were debating the ‘laptop’ podcast. I remember being impressed by their ability to articulate and argue persuasively. I’d read a viewpoint and think it was entirely reasonable, and then someone would challenge them and make a counter-argument that seemed equally convincing. For instance, I remember one member – Randfan, I think it was – posting his opinion that only a cretin would claim to be certain that anything in the material world actually existed
. We know our perceptions and that is all we can ever know
. In reply, Juliusthecat said,
But how do you know that is the case? Or rather, how do you know that you know that this is the case?
They’d discuss these vast, abstract ideas as if they were everyday topics of conversation, as casually as mum and Penny used to talk about which supermarket had the best deals on that week.

As well as forums for ‘pure’ philosophy, there were others dedicated to more specific and contemporary subjects, such as whether taking someone out for dinner was the same as using a prostitute, or the ethics of downloading music. There was also a place for people to post their personal real-life dilemmas and get rational advice. One member, for instance, wrote how she had made a new friend at work who had seemed like-minded, but had then discovered this friend believed in angels, and now she didn’t know how to talk to her any more.

On the home page was a statement from Adrian, in which he introduced himself as the founder of the site and stated that although he was interested in all philosophy, he was a Libertarian at heart. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know what that word meant. I hadn’t even heard it before. He explained that Libertarians believed that people owned their own bodies, and the products of their labour, and were against force: essentially, that we should all be free to do whatever we wanted as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else. There didn’t seem anything to disagree with about that.

Some members were obsessed with the political and economic sides of Libertarianism, full of plans to banish governments and railing against taxes, but they tended to stay in their respective forums, so it was easy to avoid them. People tended to stick to one or two topics that most interested them: I found I spent most of my time in Ethics, but there were forums for Religion, Arts, Logic and Maths, and so forth.

The site was an antidote to the rest of the web: to the rest of the world, really. Only rational thinking was tolerated, and anyone who wavered off course was immediately called up on it. There was no casual use of words – ‘literally’ meant ‘literally’ – and unlike other forums, proper punctuation and spelling were expected.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t a supportive community. Banishment was only enforced if a member was fundamentally opposed to a basic tenet of the site – if they weren’t an atheist, for instance – or as a last resort for persistent troublemakers, like JoeyK.

You could see it coming, when someone was going to be banished. They, the member, would start to get all cocky on the forum, challenging Adrian just for the sake of it, thinking they were being clever. He would patiently engage with them, rationally argue, but if they continued being difficult and hogging the board and ruining things for everyone else, he would have no option but to ask them to leave. As he said, if they disagreed so strongly with what he was saying, there must be a better place for them. There were plenty of other philosophy sites out there.

After a few weeks of listening to the podcasts and lurking on the forums, I took the plunge and joined. I chose a username, Shadowfax, and spent some time deciding which of my favourite quotes I should have as my ‘sig’. In the end I went for Douglas Adams’ ‘Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose’, which always made me laugh.

I posted my first comment on a discussion about altruism: whether an act can really be selfless, or whether we’re just doing things that ultimately benefit ourselves. The posters were in broad consensus that nothing we did was selfless, but I felt differently. I put across the point that when we are close to other people, the distinction between what is ‘best for me’ and ‘best for others’ is artificial. What is ‘best for me’ is often to sacrifice some self-interest in order to help others. Within seconds, someone replied, broadly agreeing with me but pointing out something I had missed, and soon others joined in and it became a full debate. Hobbesian2009 wrote
Good entrance, Shadowfax!
Most newcomers to the site, you see, just posted a timid introductory message, rather than launching straight into a debate. I had made something of an impact.

Two weeks later, I decided to start my own thread. I spent a while choosing my subject; it had to be attention-grabbing but not so outrageous or provocative I looked like a troll. I decided upon a subject that had been on my mind for a while: whether it was OK for a person to do nothing with their lives except what they wanted to do – for example, play World of Warcraft – as long as they could support themselves and didn’t harm anyone else.

Immediately after posting, I had an unsettling few minutes when I thought that no one was going to pick it up, but then received my first comment. The thread got seven responses in all, which I learned was pretty good. Most regulars were wary of newbies, waiting for them to prove their commitment before they engaged with them. To my surprise, Adrian himself joined the discussion, posting his opinion that those who were lucky enough to be in a secure position should use some of their privileges to help others who had a worse start in life.

I won’t say I found debating on Red Pill easy from the start, but it did come quite naturally. What I liked about it was that once you had the tools, you could apply them to almost any subject, including those you had no experience in. For instance, I was a significant contributor to a discussion on whether it’s more ethical to adopt children than give birth to them. For the next few weeks I contributed to debates and spent most of my evenings on the site. I got to know the regulars. Although the site had nearly four thousand registered members across the world, there were only around fifty people who regularly contributed to debates, and so they quickly became familiar.

It was quite a tight ‘clique’, but one you could get into by demonstrating intelligence and logic. They gradually came to accept me, and a happy moment came when once, in response to a newbie asking about an ethical matter, Not-a-sheep wrote,
Shadowfax, we need you!
, because I was known to be strong in that particular area.

I also started reading. Adrian posted a list of books – ‘the canon’, he called it – which he said were essential grounding for anyone who wanted to get the best out of the site, like Plato’s
Dialogues
, Hume, Descartes and Kant. I ordered a few from Amazon. I read a lot before but only really sci-fi and fantasy novels, and I found them hard going at first, but I persevered and set myself an hour’s reading time every evening, making notes as I went along.

I had received several PMs – personal messages – from Adrian himself. The first was a welcome message when I joined up, and then another after three months on the forum, congratulating me for surviving the initiation period (most members drop out before then, apparently). Then, after nearly six months of regular posting, I got a PM from him asking me to apply to become an Elite Thinker.

The way the site worked is that once you’d posted your fifteenth comment you graduated from being an NE, which stands for Newly Enlightened, to a fully-fledged member. Most people remained at that stage, but a small number were invited to take an online test for Elite Thinkers. This meant that Adrian deemed you capable of more advanced thought, and, if successful, you got access to a special forum where discussion was on a higher level. It was a subscription, twenty pounds a month.

In the PM, Adrian said he had been particularly impressed by my participation in a debate over the difference between shame and guilt.
You’ve really impressed me, Shadowfax. You’re one hell of a smart cookie.
It was quite a thrilling moment, I must say.

Of course, I said yes. Adrian sent a link to the test, which was in two parts. The first asked me to respond to a series of ethical dilemmas of the sort I was used to debating on the site – whether I would kill one person to save five others, for example. The second part of the test was more of a personality test, a list of statements that required simple yes or no answers.
It’s difficult to get you excited. You readily help people while asking nothing in return. You can easily see the general principle behind specific occurrences.

A few hours after submitting the test Adrian emailed to say I had passed, and I was admitted into the Elite Thinkers. From then on, I spent most of my time on the ET forum. There were around fifteen members who were very active, posting several times a day, and I was one of them.

Then came the day of
that
message.

It arrived late one afternoon, when I was in the middle of an overdue testing report. Since discovering Red Pill I had let my work slide somewhat, and the previous week Damian had sent a stiff email advising me that although he was sensitive to my grief over mum’s death, he was going to have to let me go if I didn’t meet deadlines.

So, I was trying to get this report finished, but nonetheless couldn’t resist opening Adrian’s PM. It was immediately clear that this was something different from his usual messages. On the site I was always known by my username, Shadowfax, but here he used my real name. He must have got it from my credit-card details.