John V. Wood Audiobook Narration Demo
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North American (General)Transcript
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everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing. When they first heard about the contest, I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons. When the news bulletin broke in on my video feed, announcing that James Halliday had died during the night. I'd heard of Halladay, of course, everybody had. He was the video game designer responsible for creating the Oasis, a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis. The unprecedented success of the Oasis had made Halladay one of the wealthiest people in the world. At first I couldn't understand why the media was making such a big deal of the billionaires death. After all, the people of Planet Earth had other concerns. The ongoing energy crisis, catastrophic climate change, widespread famine, poverty and disease. Half a dozen wars, you know, dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria. Normally, the news feeds didn't interrupt everyone's interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened, like the outbreak of some new killer virus or another major city banishing in a mushroom cloud. Big stuff like that as famous as he Waas. Halliday's death should have warranted on Lee a brief segment on the evening news so the unwashed masses could shake their heads and envy when the newscasters announced the obscenely large amount of money that would be doled out to the Rich man's airs. But that was the rub. James Halliday had no heirs. He had died a 67 year old bachelor with no living relatives and, by most accounts, without a single friend. He'd spent the last 15 years of his life and self imposed isolation during which time, if the rumors are to be believed, he'd gone completely insane. So the rial, jaw dropping news that January morning, the news that had everyone from Toronto to Tokyo crapping in their cornflakes, concerned the contents of holidays, last will and testament and the fate of his vast fortune. Halladay had prepared a short video message, along with instructions that it be released to the world media at the time of his death. He'd also arranged to have a copy of the video email toe every single oasis user. That same morning. I still remember hearing that familiar Elektronik chime when it arrived in my inbox just a few seconds after I saw that first news bulletin. His video message was actually a meticulously constructed short film titled Anoraks. Invitation. Ah, famous eccentric Halladay had harbored a lifelong obsession with the 19 eighties, the decade during which he'd been a teenager and anoraks invitation was crammed with obscure eighties pop culture references, nearly all of which were lost on me the first time I viewed it. The entire video was just over five minutes in length, and in the days and weeks that followed, it would become the most scrutinized piece of film in history, surpassing even the Zapruder film in the amount of painstaking frame by frame analysis devoted to it. My entire generation would come to note every second of Halliday's message by heart, and Iraq's invitation begins with The Sounds of Trumpets, the opening of an old song called Dead Man's Party. The song plays over a dark screen for the first few seconds, until the trumpets are joined by a guitar, and that's when Halladay appears. But he's not a 67 year old man ravaged by time and illness. He looks just as he did on the cover of Time magazine, back in 2014. A tall, thin, healthy man in his early forties with unkempt hair and his trademarked horn rimmed glasses, he's also wearing the same clothing he wore in the time cover photo, faded jeans and a vintage Space Invaders T shirt. Halladay is at a high school dance being held in a large gymnasium. He's surrounded by teenagers whose clothing, hairstyles and dance moves all indicate the time period is the late 19 eighties. Halladay is dancing to something no one ever saw him do in real life. Grinning maniacally, he spends in rapid circles, swinging his arms and head in time with the song flawlessly cycling through several signature eighties dance moves. But Halladay has no dance partner. He is, as the saying goes, dancing with himself. A few lines of text appear briefly at the lower left hand corner of the screen, listing the name of the band, the song's title, the record label and the year of release, as if this were an old music video airing on MTV. Oingo Boingo. Dead Man's Party, M. C. A. Records. 1985. When the lyrics kick in, Halladay begins to lip sync along still gyrating, all dressed up with nowhere to go walking with a dead man over my shoulder. Don't run away. It's only me. He abruptly stops dancing and makes a cutting motion with his right hand, silencing the music. At the same moment, the dancers and the gymnasium behind him vanish, and the scene around him suddenly changes. Halladay now stands at the front of a funeral parlor next to an open casket. A second, much older holiday lies inside the casket, his body emaciated and ravaged by cancer. Shiny quarters cover each of his eyelids. The younger Halliday gazes down at the corpse of his older self with mock sadness, then turns to address the assembled Mourners. Halliday snaps his fingers and a scroll appears in his right hand. He opens it with a flourish, and it unfurls to the floor, unraveling down the aisle in front of him. He breaks the fourth wall addressing the viewer and begins to read, Hi, James Donovan Halladay, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make publish and declare this instrument to be my last will and testament, hereby revoking any and all wills and codicils by me at any time. here to for made. He continues reading faster and faster, plowing through several more paragraphs of legalese until he's speaking so rapidly that the words are unintelligible. Then he stops abruptly. Forget it, he says. He even at that speed it would take me a month to read the whole thing. Sad to say, I don't have that kind of time. He drops the scroll and it vanishes in a shower of gold dust. Let me just give you the highlights. The funeral parlor vanishes, and the scene changes. Once again. Halladay now stands in front of an immense bank fault door. My entire estate, including the controlling share of stock in my company, Gregarious simulation systems, is to be placed in escrow until such time as a single condition I have set forth in my will is met. The first individual to meet that condition will inherit my entire fortune, currently valued in excess of $240 billion. The vault door swings open and Halladay walks inside. The interior of the vault is enormous, and it contains a huge stack of gold bars roughly the size of a large house. Here's the dough I'm putting up for grabs, Halliday says, grinning broadly. Ah, what the ****, You can't take it with you, right? Halladay leans against the stack of gold bars, and the camera pulls in tight on his face. Now I'm sure you're wondering. What do you have to do to get your hands on all this moolah? Well, hold your horses, kids. I'm getting to that. He pauses dramatically. His expression changing to that of a child about to reveal a very big secret holiday snaps his fingers again in the vault, disappears in the same instant holiday, shrinks and morphs into a small boy wearing brown corduroys and a faded the Muppet Show T shirt. The young Halladay stands in a cluttered living room with burnt orange carpeting, wood paneled walls and Kishi late seventies to core a 21 inch Zenith. Television sits nearby within Atari 2600 game console hooked up to it. This was the first video game system I ever owned, Halliday says now in a child's voice on Atari 2600. I got it for Christmas. In 1979 he plops down in front of the Atari, picks up a joystick and begins to play my favorite game was this one, he says, nodding at the TV screen where a small square is traveling through a series of simple mazes. It was called adventure. Like many early video games, adventure was designed and programmed by just one person. But back then, Atari refused to give its programmers credit for their work, so the name of the game's creator didn't actually appear anywhere on the packaging. On the TV screen, we see Halliday use a sword to slay a red dragon, although due to the games crude, low resolution graphics, this looks more like a square using an arrow to stab a deformed duck.