Glitchworld Ground Zero

By Nolan Locke and Damien Hanson

A Nanotechnology Park Gone Wrong, Rogue AIs, Prisoners on the Loose, and Way Too Many Dirty Acronyms

This is the pre-reader to Glitchworld - a ten book four tier action comedy pyramid serial whose first 4 books setup the origin stories of the heroes and villains of the series. Watch as they are set loose upon each other, interacting, allying, battling and betraying one another as the world’s premier nanotech theme park breaks down and becomes increasingly deadly. It is a nanotechnology gray goo LitRPG Battle Royale with multiple types of gamers and gamer strategies clashing to save, or control, the world. Enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nolan Locke
• Release date: Jul 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005367985

Book preview

GlitchWorld: Ground Zero

A GlitchWorld Novella

Nolan Locke

Damien Hanson

A Nerd! Production

Cover Design and Illustration by Brent Meske

Copyright © 2020 Nolan Locke, Damien Hanson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

For more information, address: [e-mail] or [e-mail]

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank everyone who followed and liked us on Royal Road, Facebook, and on my author page at https://damienhansonbooks.com/. Usually we do something satirical here as you will see with future releases but as new authors we are grateful for the support and really appreciate the reviews and comments.

I want to dedicate this book to ambassadors, arbor vitaes, bald pate friars, the best leg of three, buttonhole workers, candysticks, credentials, doodle-dashers, dingwallaces and gentleman ushers. Without you, half of our jokes wouldn’t make sense.

Prelude

A small child sits down in the dirt, playing with toys outside of a plastic hovel. Inside we can see the rest of his family clad in VR Suits, running on multi-directional treadmills. Clusters of flies blob about the structure, rotten food clogging the sinks and all over the table.

A voice booms out.

Is your family playing VR again?

Uh-huh, the boy nods sadly.

Are they letting themselves and their house go to shit because they’re stuck in some dumbass computerized server?

The boy looks taken aback, but nods again.

Well no more!

A helicopter swoops over and a team of swat officers begin to rappel down. Where it should read SWAT it instead reads PRESTIGE GAMING. The boy looks scared and scrambles backwards in the dirt as the officers smash through the windows of the home and start kicking ass. The voiceover continues.

Don’t be scared Billy. Be excited! At Prestige Gaming your parents are going to have to give a shit because it’s REAL GAMING but in REAL LIFE! Go ahead and take Dad’s wallet, Billy. He’s not going to stop you.

The camera pans to a haggard and disheveled man, skin and bones clad now in just a yellowed pair of underwear, his VR suit having been stripped off. A foot on his chest keeps him in place and blood is coming from one nostril. Don’t you dare Billy! the man rasps.

The boy looks unsure as he picks his way past his mother, father, and sister, but he grabs up the wallet, yanks out a money cube, and shoves it into a slot on the family server. Prestige Gaming! he yells triumphantly.

There is a flash and then there they are, running through the real world, Billy a Power Ranger as the rest gaze on in awe. Dad wobbles forward unsteadily on legs unused to anything but the strange whir of the VR tread.

PRESTIGE GAMING - WHY PLAY A GAME WHEN YOU CAN LIVE ONE IN REAL LIFE!

***

The screen flickered off and the lights of the room flashed on. Businessmen and women turned as one to face the only one who stood– Jack Koff. And stand he did, very erect and glorious. Everyone watched and waited, staring at his face as he grabbed the shaft of the microphone. One bad word, one angry whisper, and they would be fucked.

Jack glanced over them all and broke into a grand smile. Tremendous work, he ejaculated, consummating months of hard sweaty work and late nights in the office. The business people let out a groan of relief. Then they rose and cheered, hugging and laughing as their boss gave them his trademark thumbs up. The commercial would debut at some time in the next few weeks.

Chapter 1 - Eat my Containment Unit for Neutralizing Trauma

Ravindra Pradthala spread his perfectly manicured hands wide to show off the perfectly white game environment surrounding him, and smiled his perfectly whitened smile at the pair of cameras pointed at him. He had on a bone white haptic bodysuit, with thin streaks of light running down various parts of his body in eye-catching angles… and somehow all those angles led the eye directly to the man’s crotch. His vacuum-sucked haptic bodysuit-covered bulge. You could do a full shot of him, and it would be the only thing anyone could look at, or you could frame him from the waist up, and yet again somehow you’d be peering at the bottom of the screen to see exactly what all his clothing and body language pointed to.

Surrounding Ravindra was basically a field of snow white, stacked up around him in vaguely recognizable shapes: maybe a house or low, steep hill, maybe a tree over there, and past that, about fifty feet off, a sheer wall going straight up a good fifty or sixty feet, to a ceiling. Pure white. The whole thing surrounded them, to the extent of about half a city block square, maybe a hundred to two hundred feet of blinding white, with only the barest of lines where they were suctioned together.

His dark skin stood out in stark contrast, but even that didn’t last long. He gestured to the crew standing by, who handed him a helmet with a big old bubble shield, which schloomped down over his head and seemed to suck itself onto him.

Everybody hear me okay? he asked.

Yes, sir!

We can hear you just fine.

One was a NNN (National News Network) field correspondent, a man so perfectly sculpted it couldn’t have been real, while his counterpart at Gaming News International (GNI) was a female so stunning you would swear they only found those in heaven. Both were heavily tanned to the point of being unable to guess at their ethnicity, with teeth so white and hair so perfect it just boggled the mind. Not so the camera crew, but they weren’t on screen and therefore didn’t matter.

Just say the word, the CEO of Prestige gaming said, and continued to hold his hands out in a stiff welcoming gesture.

Several more moments passed, where NNN and GNI got everything in order. Shanaya Pradthala suppressed a groan watching her uncle do his PR nonsense.

She did not want to be here. She didn’t want to be on the same continent as this peacock parade.

They sent her to the ritziest private school America had to offer, bought her all the most expensive designer clothes, and next year they were going to buy her a whatever-car-she-asked-for. Which sounded great, except that she’d seen all the tabloids about her. She’d gotten in with a couple of people on social media and message boards, pretending she wasn’t the great Shanaya Pradthala, pride and joy of the Prestige Pradthalas.

People hated her. They had never seen a video of her, didn’t know what her voice sounded like, but they sure did hate her. They hated how much money her family had, all the billions, even though she had no idea what a billion dollars even looked like. They hated her family’s houses in LA and Miami