Tomas Read Free

TV. Shit TV is the biggest media network in world history, with an audience of billions. After years of tedious reality shows – singing competitions, jungle-survival programmes, business-apprentice shoot-outs – people want more. Shit TV is the answer.
    Shit TV broadcasts globally twenty-four hours per day. Dozens of shows cover everything that is most base and nasty in the world – trafficking, violence, perversions of every sort; in short, shit: a celebration of the fetid trough of dirty Russian money, footballers abusing adolescent girls and bankers raping the planet. And why not? If the ship’s sinking, let the people watch.
    Programmes include ‘Fuck Me for A Lie’, in which pretend film producers trick girls into sex; ‘Fat Ballet: Eat My Fat’, featuring obese dancers who perform before an audience in hysterics and then do something too disgusting to describe; and the ever popular original, ‘Shit TV Show’, of which Tomas is the star.
    Shit TV has also achieved a technological breakthrough. Millions of TV sets are fitted with a connecting tube and buttons marked ‘smell’ and ‘shit’. Viewers watching ‘I’m a Raw-Sewage Swimmer’ can heighten theirolfactory pleasure by pressing ‘smell’. A surprising number use the ‘shit’ button.
    Tomas enjoys cult status worldwide. He’s an object of desire to millions of girls who are obsessed with his Messiah-like looks. Still more boys want to copy his devil-be-damned attitude and hippy-chic style. His job, like his appearance, is simplicity itself. He pitches up with a camera crew at major events – royal weddings, political swearing-ins, football finals. Within full view of the ceremony, event or podium in question he drops his trousers and defecates, to the unbridled joy of a global audience. He then speeds off, trousers and other unpleasantries trailing.
    St Paul was converted on the road to Damascus; Tomas in the Emperor Napoleon’s tomb in the centre of Paris on a cloudless summer’s day, at a ceremony to mark the great man’s birthday. Having reconnoitered the chamber meticulously, Tomas leapt forward at the critical moment to perform his act when he was dazzled by a sunbeam streaming into the tomb from a dome window. It was a moment of incandescent light, beauty and joy. An invisible voice inside Tomas’s head told him he’d been called to a higher purpose. The world was tipping into a foul sewer of despond. Drastic, even murderous action was needed to awaken society before it was too late. It would be righteous to take it: although he had erred, even the lowliest may rise, and the sinner become a saint. This was his task: a sacred quest to save the world.
    Numbed but certain of his mission, Tomas arrived on the French Riviera a few hours later.
    The old enemy awakes
…
    The Russian Great Bear stirs in his wintry lair. Although it’s summer on the French Riviera, he prefers his cave of perpetual cold. He has spent years here healing his wounds, some as deep as the revenge he’s planning.
    The beast’s fur is mottled, criss-crossed with scars of war and defeat. His shoulders are stooped and he walks across his lair on stocky legs with an awkward gait; a slow shaggy giant. This only serves to deceive: his strength has returned and he’s fast if he needs to be.
    Russia’s loss of the Cold War two decades ago dealt a shattering blow to the Great Bear and sent him into his hibernation of depression and disgrace. There he slept, his pain anaesthetised by the cold. Finally, he woke and began to plot his vengeance from his kingdom of ice and snow.
    He recalls the early days of his plan, the seeming impossibility of joining battle with the West once again. Force was useless; in running the arms race Russia had buckled and collapsed. He had to find a more subtle means. But what? Communism was in chaos, everything he believed in swept away by