Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘Listen, why do we show him pissed if he’s only virtual?’

‘Improves the ratings.’

‘This improves his ratings?’

‘Not his rating. What kind of rating can an electromagnetic wave have? The channel’s ratings. Never tried to figure out why it’s forty thousand a minute during prime time news?’

‘I just did. How long has he been… like this?’

‘Since that time he danced in Rostov during the election campaign. When he fell off the stage. We had to get him coded double quick. Remember that by-pass operation he had? There were no end of problems. By the time they finished digitising him, he stank so bad that everyone was working in respirators.

‘But how do they do the face?’ Tatarsky asked. The movement and the expression?’

‘Same thing. Only it’s an optical system, not a magnetic one. "Adaptive optics". And for the hands we have the "Cyber Glove" system. Slice two fingers off one of them - and Boris is your uncle.’

‘Hey, guys,’ said one of the engineers, ‘keep it down a bit, can you? Arkasha’s got another jump to do. Let him rest up.’

‘What?’ said Arkasha, sitting up in the hammock. ‘You lost your marbles, have you?’

‘Let’s go,’ said Morkovin.

The next space Morkovin took Tatarsky into was called the ‘Virtual Studio’. Despite the name, inside there were genuine cameras and studio lights that gave off a pleasant warmth. The studio was a large room with green walls and floor. They were filming several people got up in fashionable rural outfits. They were standing round an empty space and nodding thoughtfully, while one of them rolled a ripe ear of wheat between his hands. Morkovin explained that they were prosperous farmers, who were cheaper to shoot on film than to animate.

‘We tell them more or less which way to look,’ he said, ‘and when to ask questions. Then we can match them up with anyone we like. Have you seen Starship Troopers? Where the star-ship troopers fight the bugs?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s the same thing. Only instead of the troopers we have farmers or small businessmen, inside of the automatics we have bread and salt, and instead of the bug we have Zyuganov or Lebed. Then we match them up, paste in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour or the Baikonur launch-pad in the background, copy it to Betacam and put it out on air… Let’s go take a look at the control room as well.’

The control room, located behind a door with the coy inscription ‘Engine Room’, failed to make any particular impression on Tatarsky. The two guards with automatic rifles standing by the door made an impression all right, but the actual premises seemed uninteresting. They consisted of a small room with squeaky parquet flooring and dusty wallpaper with green gladioli that could clearly remember Soviet times very well. There was no furniture in the room, but hanging on one wall was a colour photograph of Yuri Gagarin holding a dove in his hands, and the wall opposite was covered with metal shelving holding numerous identical blue boxes, on which the only decoration was the Silicon Graphics logo, looking like a snowflake. In appearance the boxes were not much different from the device Tatarsky had seen once in Draft Podium. There were no interesting lamps or indicators on these boxes - any old run-of-the-mill transformer might have looked just the same - but Morkovin behaved with extreme solemnity.

‘Azadovsky said you like life to have big tits,’ he said. ‘Well, this is the biggest of the lot. And if it doesn’t excite you yet, that’s just because you’re not used to it yet.’

‘What is it?’

‘A 100/400 render-server. Silicon Graphics turns them out specially for this kind of work - high end. In American terms it’s already outdated, of course, but it does the job for us. All of Europe runs on these, anyway. It can render up to one hundred primary and four hundred secondary politicians.’

‘A massive computer,’ Tatarsky said without enthusiasm.

‘It’s not even a computer. It’s a stand with twenty-four computers controlled from a single keyboard. Four 1,5-giga-hertz processors in every one. Each block calculates the frames in turn and the entire system works a bit like an aviation cannon with revolving barrels. The Americans took big bucks off us for this baby! But what can you do? When everything was just starting up, we didn’t have anything like it. Now, you know yourself, we never will have. The Americans, by the way, are our biggest problem. They keep cutting us back like we were some kind of jerks.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘The processor frequency. First they cut us back by two hundred megahertz for Chechnya. It was really for the pipeline - you realise that, anyway. Then because we stole those loans. And so on, for any old reason at all. Of course, we push things to the limit at night, but they watch TV in the embassy like everyone else. As soon we step up the frequency they pick it up and send round an inspector. It’s plain shameful. A great country like this stuck on four hundred megahertz - and not even our own.’

Morkovin went over to the stand, pulled out a slim blue box and lifted up its lid to expose a liquid-crystal monitor. Below it was a keyboard with a track-ball.

‘Is that the keyboard it’s controlled from?’ Tatarsky asked.

‘Of course not,’ said Morkovin with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘You need clearance to be able to get into the system. All the terminals are upstairs. This is just a check monitor. I want to see what we’re rendering at the moment.’

He prodded at the keys and a window with a progress indicator appeared at the bottom of the screen. It also had several incomprehensible messages in English in it: memory used 5184 M, time elapsed 23:11:12 and something else in very fine script. Then the pathway selected appeared in large letters:

C:/oligarchs/berezka/excesses/field_disgr/slalom.prg.

‘I see,’ said Morkovin. ‘It’s Berezovsky in Switzerland.’

Small squares containing fragments of an image began covering the screen, as though someone was assembling a jigsaw. After a few seconds Tatarsky recognised the familiar face with a few black holes in it still not rendered - he was absolutely astounded by the insane joy shining in the already computed right eye.

‘He’s off skiing, the bastard,’ said Morkovin, ‘and you and me are stuck in here breathing dust.’

‘Why’s the folder called "excesses"? What’s so excessive about skiing?’

‘Instead of those sticks with flags on them the storyboard has him skiing round naked ballerinas,’ Morkovin replied. ‘Some of them have blue ribbons and some of them have red ones. We filmed the girls out on the slope. They were delighted to get a free trip to Switzerland. Two of them are still doing the rounds over there.’

He turned off the control monitor, closed it and pushed the unit back into place. Tatarsky was suddenly struck by an alarming thought. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you say the Americans are doing the same?’

‘Sure. And it started a lot earlier. Reagan was animated all his second term. As for Bush - d’you remember that time he stood beside a helicopter and the hair he’d combed across his bald patch kept lifting up and waving in the air? A real masterpiece. I don’t reckon there’s ever been anything in computer graphics to compare with it. America…’

‘But is it true their copywriters work on our politics?’

‘That’s a load of lies. They can’t even come up with anything any good for themselves. Resolution, numbers of pixels, special effects - no problem. But it’s a country with no soul. All their political creatives are pure shit. They have two candidates for president and only one team of scriptwriters. It’s just full of guys who’ve been given the push by Madison Avenue, because the money’s bad in politics. I’ve been looking through their election campaign material for ages now, and it’s dreadful. If one of them talks about a bridge to the past, then a couple of days later the other one’s bound to start talking about a bridge to the future. For Bob Dole all they did was rewrite the Nike slogan from "just do it" to "just don’t do it". And the best they can come up with is a blow job in the Oral Office… Nah, our scriptwriters are ten times as good. Just look what rounded characters they write. Yeltsin, Zyuganov, Lebed. As good as Chekhov. The Three Sisters. Anyone who says Russia has no brands of its own should have the words rammed down their throat. With the talent we have here, we’ve no need to feel ashamed in front of anyone. Look at that, for instance, you see?’