Babylon (25 page)

   ‘You mean they’re all…?’

   ‘Every last one of them.’

   ‘Oh come off it,’ Tatarsky said uncertainly. ‘What about all the people who see them every day?’

   ‘Where?’

   ‘On TV… Oh, right… Well, I mean… After all, there are people who meet them every day.’

   ‘Have you seen those people?’

   ‘Of course.’

   ‘Where?’

   Tatarsky thought about it. ‘On TV,’ he said.

   ‘You get my point, then?’

   ‘I’m beginning to,’ Tatarsky replied.

   ‘Speaking strictly theoretically, you could meet someone who tells you he’s seen them himself or even knows them. There’s a special service for that called The People’s Will. More than a hundred of them, former state security agents, and all Azadovsky’s men. That’s their job: to go around telling people they’ve just seen our leaders. One at his three-storey dacha, one with an under-age whore, one in a yellow Lamborghini on the Rubliovskoe Highway. But The People’s Will mostly works the beer halls and railway stations, and you don’t hang around those places.’

   ‘Are you telling me the truth?’ Tatarsky asked.

   "The truth, cross my heart.’

   ‘But it’s such a massive scam.’

   ‘Aagh, no,’ Morkovin said with a grimace, ‘please, not that. By his very nature every politician is just a television broadcast. Even if we do sit a live human being in front of the camera, his speeches are going to be written by a team of speechwriters, his jackets are going to be chosen by a group of stylists, and his decisions are going to be taken by the Interbank Committee. And what if he suddenly has a stroke - are we supposed to set up the whole shebang all over again?’

   ‘OK, let’s say you’re right,’ said Tatarsky. ‘But how is it possible on such a huge scale?’

   ‘Are you interested in the technology? I can give you the general outline. First you need a source figure - a wax model or a human being. You use it to model the corporeal cloud. D’you know what a corporeal cloud is?’

   ‘Isn’t it some kind of astral thing?’

   ‘No. Some blockheads or other have been feeding you a load of nonsense. A corporeal cloud is the same thing as a digital cloud-form. Just a cloud of points in space. You define it either with a probe or with a laser scanner. Then the points are linked up - you impose a digital grid on them and close up the cracks. That involves a whole bundle of procedures - stitching, clean-up, and so on.’

   ‘But what do they stitch it up with?’

   ‘Numbers. They stitch up numbers with other numbers. I don’t understand it all by a long way - I studied the humanities, you know that. Anyway, when we’ve stitched everything up and cleaned it all up, we end up with a model. There are two types - one’s called polygonal, and the other’s called NURBS patch. A polygonal model consists of triangles, and a NURBS - that is ‘non-union rational bi-spline’ - consists of curves. That’s the advanced technology for serious 3-Ds. The Duma dummies are all polygonals - it’s less hassle and it keeps the faces more folksy. So when the model’s ready, you put a skeleton inside it, and that’s digital too. It’s like a set of sticks on ball-joints - on the monitor it actually looks like a skeleton, but without the ribs - and you animate the skeleton like they do for a cartoon film: move an arm this way, move a leg that way. Only we don’t actually do it by hand any more. We have special people who work as skeletons.’

   ‘Work as skeletons?’

   Morkovin glanced at his watch. "They’re shooting right now in studio number 3. Let’s go take a look. It’ll take me all day to try to explain things to you.’

   Several minutes later Tatarsky timidly followed Morkovin into a space that resembled the studio of a conceptual artist who has received a large grant for working with plywood. It was a hall two storeys high filled with numerous plywood constructions of various shapes and indefinite function -there were staircases leading into nowhere, incomplete rostrums, plywood surfaces sloping down to the floor at various angles, and even a long plywood limousine. Tatarsky didn’t see any cameras or studio lights, but there were large numbers of mysterious electrical boxes looking like musical equipment heaped up by the wall, and sitting beside them on chairs were four men who seemed to be engineers. Standing on the floor beside them were a half-empty bottle of vodka and a large number of beer cans. One of the engineers, wearing earphones, was staring into a monitor. They waved in friendly greeting to Morkovin, but no one took his attention off his work.

   ‘Hey, Arkasha,’ the man in the earphones called out. ‘Don’t laugh now, but we’ll have to go again.’

   ‘What?’ said a hoarse voice somewhere in the centre of the hall.

   Turning towards the voice, Tatarsky saw a strange device: a plywood slope like the ones you see in children’s playgrounds, only higher. The sloping surface broke off above a hammock supported on wooden poles, and an aluminium stepladder led up to its summit. A heavy, elderly man with the face of a veteran policeman was sitting on the floor beside the hammock. He was wearing tracksuit trousers and a tee shirt with an inscription in English: ‘Sick my duck’. Tatarsky thought the inscription too sentimental and not quite grammatically correct.

   ‘You heard, Arkasha. Let’s go for it again.’

   ‘How many more times?’ Arkasha mumbled. ‘Im getting dizzy.’

   ‘Try another shot to loosen you up. So far it’s still kind of tight. I mean it; take one.’

   ‘The last glass hasn’t hit me yet,’ Arkasha replied, getting up off the floor and wandering over to the engineers. Tatarsky noticed there were black plastic discs attached to his wrists, elbows, knees and ankles; and there were more of them on his body - Tatarsky counted fourteen in all.

   ‘Who’s that?’ he asked in a whisper.

   ‘That’s Arkady Korzhakov. No, don’t go getting any ideas. Not Yeltsin’s old bodyguard. He’s just got the same name. Works as Yeltsin’s skeleton. Same weight, same dimensions; and he’s an actor, too. Used to do Shakespeare at the Young People’s Theatre.’

   ‘But what does he do?’

   ‘You’ll see in a moment. Like some beer?’

   Tatarsky nodded. Morkovin brought over two cans of Tuborg. It gave Tatarsky a strange feeling to see the familiar figure in the white shirt on the can - Tuborg man was still wiping the sweat from his forehead in the same old way, afraid of continuing his final journey.

   Arkasha downed a glass of vodka and went back to the slope. He scrambled up the slope and stood motionless at the top of the plywood structure.

   ‘Shall I start?’ he asked.

   ‘Hang on,’ said the man in the earphones, ‘we’ll just recalibrate.’

   Arkasha squatted down on his haunches and took hold of the edge of the plywood surface with his hand, so that he resembled a huge fat pigeon.

   ‘What are those washers he’s got on him?’ asked Tatarsky.

   "Those are sensors,’ replied Morkovin. ‘Motion-capture technology. He wears them at the points where the skeleton has its ball-joints. When Arkasha moves, we record their trajectory. Then we filter it a little bit, superimpose it on the model and the machine works it all out. It’s a new system, called Star Trak. The hottest thing on the market right now. No wires, thirty-two sensors, works anywhere you like, but the price - you can imagine…’

   The man in the earphones turned away from the monitor.

   ‘Ready,’ he said. ‘Right I’ll run through it from the top. First you hug him, then you invite him to walk down, then you stumble. Only when you lower your arm, make it grander, more majestic. And fall flat, full length. Got it?’

   ‘Got it,’ Arkasha mumbled, and rose carefully to his feet. He was swaying slightly.

   ‘Let’s go.’

   Arkasha turned to his left, opened his arms wide and slowly brought them together in empty space. Tatarsky was amazed at the way his movements were instantly filled with stately grandeur and majestic pomp. At first it put Tatarsky in mind of of Stanislavsky’s system, but then he realised Arkasha was simply having difficulty balancing on such a tiny spot high above the floor and was struggling not to fall. When he opened his arms again, Arkasha gestured expansively for his invisible companion to descend the slope, took a step towards it, swayed on the edge of the plywood precipice and went tumbling clumsily downwards. As he fell he somersaulted twice, and if his heavy frame had not landed in the hammock there would certainly have been broken bones. Having fallen into the hammock, Arkasha carried on lying there, with his arms wrapped round his head. The engineers crowded round the monitor and began arguing about something in quiet voices.

   ‘What’s it going to be?’ Tatarsky asked.

   Without saying a word, Morkovin held out a photograph. Tatarsky saw some kind of hall in the Kremlin with malachite columns and a wide, sweeping marble staircase with a red-carpet-runnner.

   ‘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.’