Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

‘But there has to be some development of the plot, some logic…’

‘I don’t want logic, I want dirt. And this isn’t dirt, it’s just plain shit. Understand?’

‘Yes.’ replied Tatarsky, lowering his eyes.

Azadovsky softened slightly.

‘But in general.’ he stated, ‘there is a certain healthy core to it. The first plus is that it makes you hate television. You want to watch it and hate it, watch it and hate it… The second plus is that game of Monopoly. Was that your own idea?’

‘Yes,’ Tatarsky said, more brightly.

"That works. Terrorist and oligarch dividing up the people’s wealth at the gaming table… The punters’ll go raging mad at that.’

‘But isn’t it a bit too…’ Morkovin put in, but Azadovsky interrupted him.

‘No. The most important thing is to keep brains occupied and feelings involved. So this move with the Monopoly is OK. It’ll improve the news rating by five per cent at least. That means it’ll increase the value of one minute at prime time…’

Azadovsky took his calculator out of his pocket and began to press tiny buttons.

‘…by nine thousand,’ he said when he’d finished. ‘So what does that mean for an hour? Multiply by seventeen. Not bad. We’ll do it. To cut it short, let them play Monopoly and you tell the producer to inter-cut it with shots of queues for the savings bank, miners, old women, hungry children, wounded soldiers - the works. Only take out that stuff about TV anchormen, or else we’ll have to create a stink over it. Better give them a new piece for their Monopoly - a TV drilling tower. And have Berezovsky say he wants to build these towers everywhere so they can pump out oil and pump in advertising at the same time. And do a montage of the Ostankino TV tower with a rock drill. How d’you like it?’

‘Brilliant,’ Tatarsky readily agreed.

‘How about you?’ Azadovsky asked Morkovin.

‘I’m for it one hundred per cent.’

‘Yeah, right! I could replace the lot you all on my own. Right, listen to the doctor’s orders. Morkovin, you give him that new guy who writes about food for reinforcements. We’ll leave Raduev basically the way he is, only give him a fez instead of that cap of his; I’m sick of it already. That means we get in a poke at Turkey as well. And then I’ve been meaning to ask for ages about his dark glasses. Why’s he always wearing them? Are we saving time on rendering the eyes or something?’

‘That’s right,’ said Morkovin. ‘Raduev’s always in the news, and dark glasses cut down the time by twenty per cent. We get rid of all the expressions.’ Azadovsky’s face darkened somewhat.

‘God grant, we’ll get this business with the frequency sorted out. But give Berezovsky a boost, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘And do it now, urgent material.’

‘We’ll do it,’ answered Morkovin. ‘As soon as the viewing’s over we’ll go back to my office.’

‘What have we got next?’

‘Ads for televisions. A new type.’

Tatarsky rose halfway out of his chair, but Morkovin put out a hand to stop him.

‘Get on with it,’ Azadovsky said with a wave of his hand. ‘There’s still twenty minutes to go.’

The lights went out again. A small, pretty Japanese woman in a kimono appeared on the screen. She was smiling. She bowed and then spoke with a distinct accent:

‘You will now be addressed by Yohohori-san. Yohohori-san is the oldest employee at Panasonic, which is why he has been given this honour. He suffers from a speech impediment due to war wounds, so please, dear viewers, forgive him this shortcoming.’

The young woman moved aside. A thickset Japanese man appeared, holding a sword in a black scabbard. At his side there was a black streamlined television looking like an eye ripped from the head of some huge monster - the comparison occurred to Tatarsky because the background was scarlet.

‘Panasonic presents a revolutionary invention in the world of television,’ said the Japanese. "The first television in the world with voice control in all languages of the planet, including Russian. Panasword V-2!

The Japanese stared into the viewer’s eyes with an intense hatred and suddenly pulled his sword from its scabbard.

‘Sword forged in Japan!’ he yelled, setting the cutting edge up against the camera lens. ‘Sword that will slit the throat of the putrefied world! Long live the Emperor!’

Some people in white medical coats fluttered across the screen - Mr Yohohori was ushered off somewhere, a pale-faced girl in a kimono began bowing in apology and across all this disgrace appeared the Panasonic logo. A low voice-over commented with satisfaction: ‘Panasodding!’

Tatarsky heard a telephone trill.

‘Hello,’ said Azadovsky’s voice in the darkness. ‘What? I’m on my way.’

He stood up, blocking out part of the screen.

‘Ogh,’ he said, ‘seems like Rostropovich’ll get another medal today. They’re about to call me from America. I sent them a fax yesterday telling them democracy was in danger and asking them to raise the frequency two hundred megahertz. They finally seem to have twigged we’re all in the same business.’

Tatarsky suddenly had the impression that Azadovsky’s shadow on the screen wasn’t real, but just an element of a video recording, a black silhouette like the ones you get in pirate copies of films shot from the cinema screen. For Tatarsky these black shadows on their way out of the cinema, known to the owners of underground video libraries as ‘runners’, served as a special kind of quality indicator: the influence of the displacing wow-factor drove more people out of a good film than a bad one, so he usually asked for the ‘films with runners’ to be kept for him; but now he felt almost afraid at the thought that if a man who’d just been sitting beside you could turn out to be a runner, it could mean you were just another runner yourself. The feeling was complex, profound and new, but Tatarsky had no time to analyse it: humming a vague tango, Azadovsky wandered over to the edge of the screen and disappeared.

The next video began in a more traditional manner. A family - father, mother, daughter with a pussy cat and granny with a half-knitted stocking - were sitting round a fire in a hearth set in a strange mirror-surface wall. As they gazed into the flames blazing behind the grate, they made rapid, almost caricatured movements: the granny knitted, the mother gnawed on the edge of a piece of pizza, the daughter stroked the pussy cat and the father sipped beer. The camera moved around them and passed in through the mirror-wall. From the other side the wall was transparent: when the camera completed its movement, the family was overlaid by the flames in the hearth and bars of the grate. An organ rumbled threateningly; the camera pulled back and the transparent wall was transformed into the flat screen of a television with stereo speakers at each side and the coy inscription ‘Tofetissimo’ on its black body. The image on television showed flames in which four black figures were jerking in rapid movements behind metal bars. The organ fell silent and an insidious announcer’s voice took over:

‘Did you think there was a vacuum behind the absolutely flat Black Trinitron’s screen? No! there’s a flame blazing there that will warm your heart! The Sony Tofetissimo. It’s a Sin.’

Tatarsky didn’t understand very much of what he’d seen; he just thought that the coefficient of involvement could be greatly improved if the slogan was replaced by another reference to those Sex-Shop Dogs or what-d’you-call-them: Go Fumes.

‘What was that?’ he asked, when the lights came on. ‘It wasn’t much like an advertisement.’

Morkovin smiled smugly.

‘It’s not; that’s the whole point,’ he said. ‘In scientific terms, it’s a new advertising technology reflecting the reaction of market mechanisms to the increasing human revulsion at market mechanisms. To cut it short, the viewer is supposed gradually to develop the idea that somewhere in the world - say, in sunny California - there is a final oasis of freedom unconstrained by the thought of money, where they make advertisements like this one. It’s profoundly anti-market in form, so it promises to be highly market-effective in content.’