Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

The cannon of one of the tanks standing on the bridge roared and the same instant Tatarsky was struck by an interesting idea: he could offer the people in the Bridge image-service the silhouette of a tank as a promising logo to replace that incomprehensible eagle of theirs. In a split second - less time than it took for the shell to reach its target - Tatarsky’s conscious mind had weighed up the possibilities (‘the image of the tank symbolises the aggressive power of the group and at the same time introduces a traditional Russian note into the context of cosmopolitical finance’) and immediately the idea was rejected. "They’d piss themselves,’ Tatarsky decided. ‘Pity, though.’

A shell caught Peter the Great in the head, but it didn’t explode, passing straight on through and continuing its flight roughly in the direction of Gorky Park. A tall plume of steam shot up into the air. Tatarsky remembered that the head of the monument contained a small restaurant complete with full services and facilities, and he decided the blank must have severed a pipe in the heating system. He heard the TV crews yelling in delight. The swirling plume made Peter look like some monster knight out of Steven King. Remembering how the rotting brains of the monster in The Talisman had dribbled down over its shoulders, Tatarsky thought the resemblance would be complete if the next shell severed a sewage pipe.

Peter’s head was defended by the Defence of Sebastopol committee. They said in the news that didn’t mean the city, but the hotel, which was being fought over by two mafia groups, the Chechens and the Solntsevo mob. They also said the Solntsevo mob had hired stuntmen from Mosfilm and set up this strange shoot-out in order to attract TV coverage and generally inflame anti-Caucasian feeling (if the abundance of pyrotechnics and special effects was anything to go by, it had to be true). The simple-minded Chechens, who weren’t too well versed in the protocol of PR campaigns, hadn’t figured out what was going on, and they’d hired the two tanks somewhere outside Moscow.

So far the stuntmen were returning fire and giving as good as they got - there was a puff of smoke in the hole beside Peter’s ragged eye and a grenade exploded on the bridge. A tank fired in reply. The blank struck Peter’s head, sending fragments of bronze showering downwards. For some reason every new hit made the emperor even more goggle-eyed.

Of all the participants in the drama the only one Tatarsky felt any sympathy for was the bronze idol dying slowly before the glass eyes of the TV cameras; and he didn’t feel that very strongly - he hadn’t finished his work, and had to conserve the energy of his emotional centre. Tatarsky lowered the blinds, cutting himself off completely from what was going on, sat at his computer and re-read the quotation written in felt-tip pen on the wallpaper over the monitor:

In order to influence the imagination of the Russian customer and win his confidence (for the most part customers for advertising in Russia are representatives of the old KGB, GRU and party nomenklatura), an advertising concept should borrow as far as possible from the hypothetical semi-secret or entirely secret techiques developed by the Western special services for the programming of consciousness, which are imbued with a quite breathtaking cynicism and inhumanity. Fortunately, it is not too difficul to improvise on this theme-one need only recall Oscar Wilde’s words about life imitating art.

‘The Final Positioning’

‘Sure" said Tatarsky, ‘that’s not too difficult.’ He tensed as though he was about to leap into cold water, frowned, took a deep breath and held the air in his lungs while he counted to three, then launched his fingers at the keyboard:

We can sum up the preceding by saying that in the foreseeable longer term television is likely to remain the primary channel for the implantation of the customer’s schizo-units in the consciousness of the Russian public. In view of this, we regard as extremely dangerous a tendency that has emerged in recent times among the so-called middle class - the most promising stratum of viewers from the point of view of the social effectiveness ofteleschizomanipulation. We are referring to total abstinence or the conscious limitation of the amount of television watched in order to save nervous energy for work. Even professional television writers are doing it, because it is an accepted maxim of post-Freudianism that in the information age it is not sexuality that should be sublimated, so much as the energy that is squandered on the pointless daily viewing of television.

In order to nip this tendency in the bud, for this concept it is proposed to employ a method developed jointly by MI6 and the US Central Intelligence Agency for neutralising the remnants of an intellectually independent national intelligentsia in Third World Countries. (We have proceeded from the initial assumption that the middle class in Russia is formed directly from the intelligentsia, which has ceased thinking nationally and begun thinking about where it can get money.)

The method is extremely simple. Since every television channel’s programming contains a fairly high level of synapse-disrupting material per unit of time …

There was a boom outside the window, and shrapnel drummed across the roof. Tatarsky drew his head down into his shoulders. Having re-read what he’d written, he deleted ‘synapse-disrupting’ and replaced it with ‘neuro-destrucnve’.

… the goal of schizosuggestology will be achieved simply as a result of holding the individual to be neutralised in front of a television screen for a long enough period of time. It is suggested that in order to achieve this result one can take advantage of a typical feature of a member of the Intelligentsia - sexual frustration.

Internal ratings and data from secret surveys indicate that the biggest draw for the member of the intelligentsia is the erotic night-time channels. But the effect achieved would be maximised if instead of a certain set of television broadcasts the television receiver itself were to achieve the status of an erotic stimulus in the consciousness of the subject being processed. Bearing in mind the patriarchal nature of Russian society and the determinative role played by the male section of the population in the formation of public opinion, it would seem most expedient to develop the subconscious associative link: ‘television-female sexual organ’. This association should be evoked by the television itself regardless of its make or the nature of the material being transmitted in order to achieve optimal results from schizomanipulation.

The cheapest and technically simplest means of achieving this goal is the massive oversaturation of air time with television adverts for women’s panty-liners. They should be constantly doused with blue liquid (activating the associations: ‘blue screen, waves in the ether, etc.’), while the clips themselves should he constructed in such a way that the panty-liner seems to crawl on to the screen itself, implanting the required association in the most direct manner possible.

Tatarsky heard a light ringing sound behind him and he swung round. To the accompaniment of a strange-sounding, somehow northern music, a golden woman’s torso of quite exceptional, inexpressible beauty appeared on the television screen, rotating slowly. ‘Ishtar,’ Tatarsky guessed; ‘who else could it be?’ The face of the statue was concealed from sight behind the edge of the screen, but the camera was slowly rising and the face would come into sight in just a moment. But an instant before it became visible, the camera moved in so close to the statue that there was nothing left on the screen but a golden shimmering. Tatarsky clicked on the remote, but the image on the television didn’t change - the television itself changed instead. It began distending around the edges, transforming itself into the likeness of an immense vagina, with a powerful wind whistling shrilly as the air was sucked right into its black centre.