Russian cyberpunk: news or fiction?

The Moscow Times is running a strange little cyberpunk techno-thriller vignette — it's not clear to me whether this is news, a serialized novel, or a columnist with heavy sleepdep, but the prose is great:

Chrome was telling us how some bug hacker got into the helmet frequency one day and flooded their gourds with Donny Osmond songs. Four hours of it. What could you do? You couldn't take the helmet off or you'd over-geiger like the morons. Nearly drove them crazy. "And they call it puppy love." Chrome was crooning, laughing, riding high. He'd just bagged Laila, the one who used to be on TV here — half a week's pay, but they said get her now because some wheel at CentComm was about to privatize her. Then he stepped outside with Dietrich and was gone.

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(Thanks, Pat!)