This one is from a dream a few days ago. I kept meaning to post it, but didn't get around to it till this morning.
The Virtual Village
The main character is a hacker. They find a hidden VR game online that, at first, appears to be a village made up of vr players. Over time, they realizes that the people in the village aren't playing VR, they're actually in the virtual village. They want to join them, but as they try to break into it, they find out that they're not there by choice. That they were abducted. They hunt the abductors and as they do, they find out the plan is to abduct the world, sending the planet itself into that digital world. They start to think it wouldn't be a bad thing, until they find out that no more children would be possible and that people still die. It's an extinction level event. It's too late to stop it, but they find a trigger to send the world back out again. The only wrinkle is that it has to be done from outside, and once triggered, it will only return what was already inside. In the end, they find the place that will be the last to digitize and wait for the last possible second, resulting in them alone in the VR world.
