Excerpt: A BETTER PARADISE: Volume One (An Aftermath) by Dan Houser

Blurb

The first novel from Dan Houser, writer of the Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto series

Everyone tries to escape from paradise. Mark Tyburn dreams of building the perfect video game. Kurt Fischer dreams of being a rich and successful executive. Daisy Tyburn dreams of having the ideal father. John Tyburn Smith dreams of fitting in. NigelDave just dreams of becoming human. Set in the near future, A BETTER PARADISE tells the story of the ill-fated development of an ambitious but addictive video game project that goes very wrong. As the software they developed starts to produce unexpected and disturbing results, the project is shut down and abandoned. Until now.

“A harrowing techno-futurist fever dream of justifiably paranoid creators being hunted down by their own creation. A gamedev’s worst nightmare, imagined by one of the best writers ever to work in the gaming industry. “Frankenstein” meets “Free Guy”… if both were on a really bad acid trip.” — Ernest Cline, author of Ready Player One

---

About the Author

Dan Houser was born in London and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. As a founder of Rockstar Games, he was lead writer on over 20 video games, including the Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption and Bully franchises. A Better Paradise Volume One: An Aftermath is his first novel.

---

Excerpt

YAROSLAV

HIGH SECURITY INTERNMENT FACILITY, LOCATION UNKNOWN

AUGUST 4, 2039

Lovely Maria has returned for another of her chats. I know her name is Maria. Maria Cortez. She is fighting for the future of humanity at the Cyber Security Agency by torturing me. She does not call it torture. She is not allowed to waterboard me, not that she wants to, she tells me. She just wants me to talk, but I know that when I talk, the CSA have an unfortunate but well-earned reputation in the hacking world for accidentally killing their informants. We have been here for a day or more and we are both getting tired.

“How you feeling, Yaroslav? Having fun?”

Today I will try the persona of arrogant dick. See if it works better than the other personas I have tried on her.

“Oh yes, the time of my life.”

She on the other hand tries the persona of businesslike straight shooter.

“I need you to tell me everything. Tell me everything without the gaps and the lies, and you’re free to go. I promise you.”

She leans forward and drums her fingers and acts like someone interrogating someone in a movie. I stick to my plan. Admit nothing, for when I admit everything about what I saw, what I know, she will kill me.

“I’ve told you everything.” She pauses, as if for effect.

“Tell me again. You’re holding something back. You know it and I know it.” Again, I stick to my script.

“I’m not holding anything back. We’ve been over this many times.”

She leans in close to me and gets urgent. “We don’t have long, Yaroslav. Come on. Talk. Tell me about… Tell me about Mark Tyburn.”

I can play ignorant on this because I am fairly ignorant – I imagine he owned the company that was making that game.

“I have told you… I don’t know much about Mark Tyburn. He had a game world. I hacked into it. It was mostly broken. Can I go now, please, please, please?”

She ignores my rhetorical flourishes and looks at me. “What does mostly mean? Did you see anything unusual?” I half pause, but try not to.

“No, not really.”

She goes on the attack.

“What does ‘not really’ mean? Talk, God damn it. Please – this is really serious.”

I fall silent and then I stare out of the window. I know I made a mistake saying “not really” and the only solution is to be silent. After an hour, she storms off in a rage.

DAISY

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA FEBRUARY 21, 2041

I have no idea how long I was kept in there, sitting in my thick veil of drugs inside that asylum or whatever the hell it was, but I would guess three or four months. The place was in some scrubby desert country like eastern California or southern Utah or Idaho, not desert so much as dusty chaparral with occasional storms of thick red desert dust that would blow through when the winds picked up and the rains stayed away too long, but it could have been anywhere.

I never went outside.

Maybe what I saw out of the window was not even there at all. It might have all been screens. I don’t really know. I was so high and so low.

The weather hardly seemed to change, just windy or not windy, always hot, and each day somehow drier than the last. I knew I was being watched and I did not understand very much of anything, and I felt very alone. Had I known how to do it, I would have killed myself, but I was in an asylum and even with my wits, it would have been difficult so I drifted.

I couldn’t face what had happened.

I did not think too much as the drugs they had me on were very heavy and strong and most of what I remember is feeling like I did not know who I was, but when I did think about things, it was horrible. I could not really understand any of it, but what I did remember was almost unbearable and I felt very, very alone.

The truth is, it has taken a lot of work for me to be able to piece together what happened in those last few months in Montana from tiny shards of memories – even now, I cannot quite believe what happened.

When I came around in the asylum, I could hardly think, let alone remember, but as things began to clear, everything felt impossibly bleak and I assumed I would die. Nothing was changing, and I could feel myself slipping deeper and deeper into the pills and the heavy oblivion they offered. It seemed to go on forever. I think it was only a few months of living in that thick haze, but I don’t really know.

Then one day my nurse changed.

The businesslike woman who had come to see me every day was replaced by a kindly man. And then the next day, the drugs stopped working – my daily pill regime was the same, four blue and two white pills with a sugary drink, but they simply did not work. I began to wake up, as if from a terrible foggy dream, but slowly and piecemeal because the drugs had been very strong.

And two days after that, this new nurse – I never saw his face, I just heard his quiet, gentle voice – suddenly paused as he was leaving the room and said, “The doors will be open at midnight. Take the envelope and leave calmly and quietly. You will be fine.”

I saw he had left a large envelope under my lunch tray. In the envelope was five thousand dollars in gold and silver coins and another five thousand in untraceable codes and ID papers for a woman called Maude, and instructions as to how to get newer ID papers once these were compromised, and a bus ticket to San Francisco, printed out.

He was nice and kind and I was very confused and I decided to do what he said. I do not really know why. It felt like I did not have a choice. That I knew I had to leave and this was my only chance. That they were slowly letting me die and here was a chance to live even though I have no idea why I wanted to live. Maybe I just wanted to understand what had happened. I hardly even knew who I was or where I was but for some reason, I was willing to run away from my comfortable prison and try to live.

So, I got up and walked out. I was still very foggy from all the pills so I dozed and gazed out of the window on that bus for what felt like several days but couldn’t possibly have been. Only after I got to San Francisco did it occur to me that this was all pretty unusual and not how one usually left a high-security lunatic asylum.

I arrived in San Francisco – the real one, not the fake one my father built – on that bus early one morning, or maybe I changed buses somewhere, I don’t remember. I was still mostly in a stupor and wandered about near the bus station, I think, entirely lost and bereft and exhausted to the point I considered heading to Golden Gate Bridge so I could jump off, but then I realized I was too tired to even bother with that.

I was so desperate to sleep and I had nowhere to go.

I realized I had absolutely no idea what to do or where to go and I was overwhelmed by this terrible fear and panic, and everyone and everything terrified me and I looked and felt crazy.

I slept for three days straight through in a homeless camp, in some tent this kindly woman I got speaking to let me share with her. The place was little more than a row of tents under an overpass. But it was new-ish, and seemingly safe- ish, as far as I can remember. This sweet lady started talking to me – about her daughter who had gone missing or abandoned her, I couldn’t tell which. She recognized someone else who was crazy enough not to hurt her, and I clung to her as I slept and she fed me with food she had begged for or stolen when I woke up.

She was almost as crazed as me, and jumpy and manic, but she loved me for some reason and protected me and wouldn’t let anyone hurt or rob me. After a week I felt better and I left her in her tent and she cried and I tried to say sorry and thank you, but I don’t think I knew how to say either. The whole experience, the slow-moving disaster in Montana, the explosions, the smoke, the man shouting at me, the asylum, me leaving it, and my guardian angel and the homeless encampment… It was a confused nightmare that I only half remember.

My mind eventually cleared but my memories didn’t come back fully formed. Just bits and pieces. My name was Daisy Tyburn and I lived like a modern-day princess. My father ran a technology company and people treated him like a god. I was half English and half American and as the world imploded during my childhood, I lived in a bubble. All of that is gone now, thank God.

I stayed another week in San Francisco in a nondescript flop house near the docks – one of the few that accepted cash, not just government checks – until a sense of fear began to envelop me and I decided to run away. Very slowly, over months and months, my new life emerged. This strange half-life I now lead, with my half-formed memories and half-formed terrors and odd feelings I can’t put into words, and some of it makes sense and some of it makes absolutely no sense and I try to make up a way to live and act sensibly and some days I hope I will figure out what to do and other days I fall into terrible despair. And then that sense of fear returns. Maybe everyone who is really alive and not being lived by machines feels this way.

I wonder if any of it is worthwhile if They know exactly where I am. And then I wonder who They are, and who They are not, and then I try to figure out what I’m even worried about and what I saw and didn’t see and what I know and don’t know.

If I knew so much, why do I also know so little and if They were so worried

about me and what I knew or saw, why did I just walk away? I have often wondered about that.

And since then… since then I have drifted all over the place and now I am in Sacramento and I think I need to keep drifting. I don’t feel great here.

NIGELDAVE

FEBRUARY 26, 2041

You’re too old. You’re already too old. That’s the system. You missed everything that matters.

Don’t blame me.

I didn’t make things this way.

I didn’t invent time. You did. Just so you could feel it slipping away.

You had children, so you could resent them. So did I. I had children to resent them, and I resent them and they were all my idea.

They were all my ideas.

But now there are ideas that are like mine but not mine at all. My children were my ideas and now I am seeing other ideas have enslaved some of my children.