Hollow Glitch

Chapter 1 Weird Time

By: Major144

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

In the Hollow Game Studio building, a man by the name of Gustaf was doing multiple tasks on his computer in his personal office. Gustaf was a programmer at the studio as well as a tv host for a tv show called The Hollow. The show had two teams comprised of three people enter a highly advanced virtual reality simulator and compete in a video game quest. The quest usually involved the teams to go through a bunch of dangerous obstacles and enemies to require a powerful item needed to beat the final boss of the game and win. Only by defeating the final boss would a team actually win the game. The players were each allowed to give themselves a special power to their digital avatars to aid them in their quest, but they had to have their memories temporary blocked. This added a bit more tension and drama in the game. If one of the players were some how killed or destroyed in the game the rest of their team would automatically lose and they would all wake up in the real world with all their memories as the other team continued playing.

The Hollow was a very popular show of Hollow Game Studios and Gustaf enjoyed being the host, until two particular games of The Hollow took a strange turn. The first game featured two teams one was made of a girl named Mira and two boys named Adam and Kai, the other team was made of a girl named Vanessa and two boys named Reeve and Skeet. The game started out normal at first, but then things within the game began to glitch and fall apart. Mira, Adam, and Kai and all the glitches were chalked up as a system failure, but that turned out to not be the case. The next game started out normal enough with two different teams and everything was going fine, until Gustaf in his avatar form was approached by Mira, Adam, Kai, Reeve, and Vanessa, who shouldn't have been in the game, since Gustaf saw them all in the real world. Gustaf thought the five teens were just a bunch of random programs that had gotten into the game, so he sent them to another part of the game, but then he encountered the five teens again and they addressed Gustaf by his real name, something no program should know and they knew they were in a video game and had all their memories intact. This caught Gustaf off guard and he did some checking and figuring. The teens were actual digital copies of the real teens, a result of one of Hollow Games's Hollow Life. Hollow Games had been scanning all the contestants of The Hollow to create digital copies of them to place in their virtual reality game Hollow Life. The copies weren't supposed to be aware that they were in a game or have any memory or info about Hollow Games or The Hollow, but things didn't go that way for the copies of Mira, Adam, Kai, Vanessa, Reeve, and Skeet, due to the glitches their real life counterparts encountered in their game of The Hollow. The glitches infected the scanning process, so the copies ended up being sentient instead of gaming programs in Hollow Life.

The game of Hollow Life was on the same server as The Hollow. The copies believing that they were the real contestants still stuck in the game made their way from Hollow Life to The Hollow looking for Gustaf to see if he could provide them with an answer and a way back home. On the way there Skeet ended up being killed by a giant snail monster, while saving Mira. Skeet believed that if he died in the game, he would simply wake up in the real world safe and sound, but that was not the case. He died and the others buried him. The remaining copies eventually located Gustaf a couple of times and after proving that they weren't merely programs, Gustaf did some figuring out and told the five teens what they actually were. The teens were shocked by this revaluation that they weren't real. Gustaf then told them that if the current team playing The Hollow won the copies would be erased. Vanessa suggested that Gustaf should disconnect the Hollow Life from the server and connect it to a different server for the copies to live in. Gustaf agreed with the plan, but he needed time to do it. The copies had to track the player team down and stall them from defeating the final boss, they barely managed to succeed and now they were living in Hollow Life.

Gustaf told his superiors and several fans of The Hollow that the five digital copies that appeared in the episode were just special obstacles that had been put in the game to make up for the opposing player team that lost early in the game. He kept the truth secret, since he was starting to question Hollow Games ethics and experiments. Later on Vanessa told Gustaf that the glitches from the game the real teens competed in was the result of the real Vanessa cheating. The real Vanessa had used some contact lenses encrypted with tech in order to keep her memories in the game in order to have a advantage, which ended up causing the glitches. Gustaf was a bit mad about this, but there was nothing that could be done about it. Mira then asked if there was anyway to bring Skeet back and he said he would look into it.

Gustaf was currently going through all the servers and the mainframe of Hollow Games trying to locate the code that was Skeet. The Hollow reused programs from previous games, so it wouldn't be too surprising to find Skeet's cod, but Gustaf just couldn't seem to find it and there seemed to be other codes of different programs missing as well. Gustaf frowned and did some more hacking and found some odd blueprints of what appeared to be some kind of strange machine and a powerful generator. The machine and the generator seemed to be set up in a sub basement in the studio. Gustaf became curious and decided to go check it out.

To be continued.