Discovery & Account
of the Promethean Database
Recently, a curious object — a common portable hard drive with very uncommon contents — found its way into the possession of the UNCB. Known as the Promethean Database, it was delivered to Alpha Point by Brandon Cooper after he discovered a cadaver in the Frontier. The corpse, now called the Promethean, was an anomalous discovery for a number of reasons including the sophisticated technology found on its person, the unique cause of death, and the fact it was found a mere twenty kilometres away from the Point; a detail that has lead citizens asking unanswerable questions about the Prometheans origin.
Cooper's field report on the discovery of the Promethean Database has been included below:
UNCB DATABASE
Scouting Report A-34C
Operative: Brandon Cooper
ARCHIVED DATA
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Body found in The Halls today.
While that's strange in itself, I mean bodies tend to go missing in the Halls, this guy was a complete mystery.
Corpse was absolutely smashed, blunt force trauma. Real visceral shit but not the work of any Entity I've heard of. Most Entities would have taken a bite or transformed the poor fuck, this guy was just paste. Still had hands and feet though, and a couple ribs left intact to tell he was definitely human.
What's really strange was the leftover equipment.
Whoever this was they were packing some serious gear. We found smashed circuitry, a dented helmet, wires everywhere, and what looked like a broken firearm right out of a Sci-Fi movie. Inside this guys backpack was food. Like, real food. Cured meat. Sourdough bread. It seemed fit to eat so we took it with us. Nearly brought me to tears tasting a slice of home.
The real reason they're making me file this report was for the Portable HD that was tucked away in his bag. We figured it was busted but brought it back to base anyways with the rest of the scrap. Luck would have it - we tested it out and it's totally fine. Chocked FULL of data. Couple terabytes of info but the formatting was all sorts of weird. Figured the data was encrypted for safekeeping - we can’t get a sniff of information about what's on that thing. Who knows what's on there, I'm just happy to give the Point something to talk about for a while — everyone trying to crack these files open will be great entertainment for a few cycles.
All things aside, the routine scouting was fine. Team got back without issue, no casualties. Happy to report we kept the boys safe.
— Cooper
*********************************
END_
This hard drive contained thousands of encrypted files which were unintelligible. It appeared all of its information was protected by a cipher.
After running a few pages past Juna (who was ecstatic to try their hand at cracking its encryption) we were pleasantly surprised to discover the information had never graced the Datasphere before — these files were completely alien to humanity or the terminal grid. With the help of the dataspace keeper and the collective efforts of citizens across the Backrooms, progress was made towards accessing the data. It was deduced that there was not one singular cipher — but many: every file was uniquely encrypted for what we could only imagine was a measure of security. The Promethean, perhaps, did not want their information to be casually read.
It took time, but, our efforts paid off. We were able to glimpse into the mystery of the Promethean's database and successfully decode a file. It did not take long for others to follow suit. We found articles very similar in nature to our own, with descriptions of locations, objects, and terrifying creatures. And the stories of people who discovered them. We had countless theories as to what would have been found but no one would have guessed an entirely separate liminal archive. The Promethean was a much stranger find than we could have imagined.
Only a handful of files had been cracked, but we started putting the pieces together to guess his origins. The Promethean was most likely a native to the Backrooms — not spliced in from Baseline — and hailed from a faraway level deep within the Backrooms system. Some have stated his appearance near Alpha Point could only have been caused by a splicing event… either by accident or intentional use of the phenomena.
A frequent journalist of the UNCB has compiled the leading theories and information regarding the Promethean in an account, below:
An Account of the Promethean Discovery
and the Implications for Humanity
”What were the chances of us finding him?”
”Like catching a baseball pitch thrown from another galaxy. He’s one in infinity”
It is terrifying to think of how soul-crushingly small we are. We often long to return to Earth, but our planet is nothing but an atom in a vast sea of astral eternity. It is easy to assume the size of the Backrooms is measurable – quantifiable. Finite. Understandable. But there is evidence to suggest the opposite. If you begin to think of the Backrooms as Superclusters, great Attractors, and unfathomable Voids… then you may be closer to the madness of reality. Consider infinite levels of infinite space, twisted up within itself through non-Euclidean geometry, fractals exploding outwards in endless complexity. Imagine the Far Rooms: limspaces millions of levels away from Outpost Kochni, and you are beginning to fathom the theorized immense scale of this realm we have by chance stumbled into. And that is simply one Liminal System, in a reality of potentially billions.
The Promethean is the only human from the Far Rooms ever discovered. Was he native to the Backrooms, or perhaps another system entirely? We cannot know for sure quite yet; as chance would have it he was found dead. However… left behind on their corpse was a miracle. The Promethean Database. On this portable hard drive was multiple terabytes worth of encrypted files describing first-hand accounts of the Far Rooms. Levels that are impossibly out of reach. Flora that can heal impossible wounds. And… monsters. Monsters so terrible we cannot comprehend. But through it all, we have deciphered information that hints at Antiquity: a massive thriving metropolis located on a safe level - and possibly the greatest collection of humanity within any Limspace. Home.
We theorize that there are far off “Frontiers”, levels of unknown distance from the UNCB where humans can also, by chance, no-clip into the Backrooms from Baseline. To assert with any certainty that our Frontier is the singular point of entry would be foolish given the potential scale of things, or if connected Limspace Systems would allow for entrance. Where the Far Rooms “Frontier” is, or where Antiquity is for that matter, is still unknown. The deeper we study the Promethean Encyclopedia the better chance we have of braving the Far Rooms; and, one day, connecting to this society of humans who have thrived in this realm for so long before us. We are all brothers and sisters wandering without purpose, but the Promethean gives us hope to find a place we belong again. His knowledge pushes us to keep exploring ever deeper into the madness of the Backrooms. The only way we’ll find the answers is to move forwards, even if it costs us our sanity — or our lives.
Deciphering the Database has become an ongoing mission taken up by archivists on Baseline and within the Backrooms themselves. Once shared through the archiver terminals it became possible for anyone connected to the network to access the Database - for each file found on the drive was uniquely encoded as if to protect the information from discovery by the wrong hands. If the Promethean had a terminal which could read these files easily it was either lost or destroyed before we found their remains. As such, each entry made readable is a shot in the dark looking for information that maybe, just maybe, will assist humanity's survival… or lead us to Antiquity.
May our yearning paleolithic gaze, robbed of a horizon, still ever catch the glimmer of a far-off guiding light.
— Saffron
For now, this is all we know. The Promethean's story is still being unravelled. As of this writing, additional pages of the Database are still being decoded — information will be made available on the dataspace whenever possible.
The collected pages of the database are kept here.