Maple IV — If humanity has been building millions of little worlds, is it not inevitable?
A parallel universe captured in SCP-9995
ITEM #:
9995
CONTAINMENT CLASS:
PENDING
Containment Procedures: Containment of SCP-9995 has failed, and it is to be incorporated into normalcy. Social media is to be monitored for any activity by prominent members of GoI-9995.
A task force of former video game hobbyists has been formed to investigate potential similar anomalies.
Description: SCP-9995 is the 2008 video game Street King Racing. Developed by the Swedish video game developer Awe Arcade for Windows computers, SCP-9995 is a street racing game with 8 levels. Players compete against 7 AI-controlled opponents to complete 3 laps the fastest. Races do not end until the player's vehicle crosses the finish line.
SCP-9995's anomalous properties are currently poorly understood, but the virtual world of the video game appears to connect to an infinite number of parallel universes that can be accessed by means of various glitches or exploits.
SCP-9995-A are entities that inhabit the parallel universes within SCP-9995. If a player's vehicle reaches a parallel universe, its SCP-9995-A entities will begin circling around the vehicle and closing in on it. SCP-9995-A entities appearing in the game view will rapidly corrupt the game's memory usage and crash the game after 4–6 seconds. Players viewing SCP-9995-A entities develop nosebleeds and headaches, but these anomalous effects are not propagated to recordings.
First documented anomaly
On October 12, 2011, Australian college student Koby "HiccupsMcBurpy" Campbell published a 2-minute video on Youtube showing a recording of SCP-9995 gameplay. In this recording, the following events took place:
Begin video transcript
HiccupsMcBurpy's open-seater race car is overtaking an AI-controlled touring car to its left. The vehicles are speeding downhill through a night-time neon-lit cityscape. Non-racing vehicles are seen further ahead on the road, and HiccupsMcBurpy steers left after overtaking to pass them as well. However, as HiccupsMcBurpy's car runs a red traffic light, a limousine crosses into his path from the right and the player's vehicle crashes into it.
HiccupsMcBurpy: Fuck!
The vehicle flips to its left and lands upside down. The car slides forwards a few meters and hits a public bench before the game's self-righting mechanism activates. However, because the front wheels of the car are stuck underneath the bench, the car fails to rotate back.
HiccupsMcBurpy: Wait. Wait wait wait wait. Wait.
HiccupsMcBurpy: Am I stuck?
HiccupsMcBurpy's wheels can be seen spinning rapidly, his front wheels smoking as they make contact with the bench. The car fails to move, its speedometer showing 0km/h.
HiccupsMcBurpy: Haha, I'm actually just completely stuck. Oh, I can't even open the menu right now? Am I softlocked? I didn't know this was possible. Am I recording? Yes, good. I wonder if I can get out of this.
30 seconds pass without any significant events. The sound of the car's engine noticeably raises in pitch over time.
HiccupsMcBurpy: Yeah, I'm stuck. Pretty sure I haven't moved a pixel since I–
From one frame to the next, the player's car is transported to an entirely black void. The car rights itself, allowing for HiccupsMcBurpy to drive around again. The background music has switched to minor key and now plays at half speed.
HiccupsMcBurpy: What the fuck? Where am I? Did the… Did the whole world just disappear?
As HiccupsMcBurpy drives in the parallel universe, he bumps into walls he cannot see. The collision sounds are muffled and glitchy, elongated sparks spray around.
HiccupsMcBurpy: There's stuff here. Are these invisible walls? I wonder if I can figure out the shape of this thing.
The car continues to drive, hugging the wall on its left until the scratching stops. HiccupsMcBurpy rotates the camera around the car for little benefit, and turns left to drive back into the object.
HiccupsMcBurpy: I think it's a cube? There's a little divot here. Is this, could this be one of the apartment buildings? Did everything just go– what's that?
Two small white glowing squares slowly move towards HiccupsMcBurpy's car, which has stopped. The video begins displaying graphical artifacts such as brightly-colored pixels and screen tearing, most obviously around the player's car. SCP-9995-A's eyes remain unaffected by these effects, and continue to approach.
HiccupsMcBurpy: What the fuck!? loud thunk is heard. What the fuck is that?
0.2 seconds of HiccupsMcBurpy's scream is recorded before the video abruptly stops.
This incident was analyzed by the Department of Informational Technologies and dismissed as per the newly instated HEROBRINE protocol.
Discovery of anomaly by civilians
On January 12, 2017, Austrian programmer Kitty "BerlinKitty" Morgenstern published a 22-minute video on Youtube describing how she and several other players collaborated to develop a consistent method to reach SCP-9995's parallel universes.
Relevant context
Parallel universes
In video games, "parallel universe" is a term used to describe errors where a copy of the level's geometry can be accessed out-of-bounds (OoB) of the typical play-area.
A known cause for "parallel universes" is a niche overflow error that is a consequence of converting floating point numbers, used to track a player character's position, to integer numbers used to generate geometry.
In Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996), this glitch was first described by Tyler Kehne in 2015. The position of Mario, the game's player character, is tracked using a floating point number, which allows for a large range of values. When calculating Mario's collisions with walls, floors, and ceilings, this number is truncated to a much smaller integer value. However, if Mario's position in any dimension is much higher or much lower than it should be (i.e., when he is positioned far away from the main level), the truncated value can be equal to a valid position in the main level, and collisions are handled as though Mario is in the main level.
Because Mario's position is only used for calculating collisions, there is no system for rendering the geometry's textures in "parallel universes." Therefore, "parallel universes" are completely invisible.
This is the explanation BerlinKitty provides in her 2017 video, but this is not an accurate description of how SCP-9995 operates. BerlinKitty noted some discrepancies in her video as well.
Due to the complexity and precision of exploits required to move a player character to a parallel universe (as they are positioned very far apart), TAS tools are required to reliably explore them.
TAS
A "tool-assisted speedrun" or "tool-assisted superplay" are terms used to describe playthroughs of video games that have been assisted with tools.
A partial transcript of BerlinKitty's video is included below:
But this still doesn't explain everything that happens in Burpy's video. For one, how did he get to a parallel universe in the first place? Well, this is where my friend from the IRC NoMortalMercy came in. They managed to put in a hack that unlocks the car's speedometer so that it can show negative speed. See, typically, the speedometer will never go below 0 km/h even if you're actually going backwards, but the game does still calculate your negative speed. It just doesn't show it.
[…]
But this can never happen in Street King Racing, because how could the wheels be both touching the top and bottom of a surface simultaneously? If you get the NASCAR car stuck upside down underneath something and hit the gas, it will just slowly slide itself out. But there is one vehicle for which this just barely works: the Formula One car.
Ok, actually, there's also the Scuttlebug, but the acceleration value on that little tricycle is so low that it literally takes 12 hours for it to build up enough speed.
[…]
While the uncapped negative speed will let you leave the level faster than I ran away from home after coming out to my parents, you still need to actually land somewhere. The thing with parallel universes is that they're very sparsely populated. We haven't done the exact math because we don't have access to the game's sourcecode, but each parallel universe is about 42,000 units removed from its neighbors. That's 12 times the size of the largest level in the game. If you angle yourself perfectly with a cardinal direction, you need to reach 868,000 speed to jump over to the nearest parallel universe in a single frame. But the Burper wasn't oriented perfectly at all. We have to look closer at the specific angle he happened to be pointing at.
[…]
There's a few open questions about the parallel universes in SKR. For one thing, in our experiments, we were able to reach parallel universes beyond the expected range of floating point numbers. Floating point arithmetic is not infinite – nothing can be – but we haven't discovered the limits in the game yet. It kinda looks like the developers may have used at least a 256-bit float to track the player's position, which would be ridiculous!
But more importantly, we cannot identify the contents of the parallel universes in RAM. As soon as your car lands in a parallel universe, RAM usage seems to drop slightly, and crashing into walls or other vehicles here does not seem to impact it at all. We're currently theorizing that the developers implemented an optimization system that is only active in the parallel universes, but this is still an open question.
This video was analyzed by the Department of Informational Technologies and dismissed as per the newly instated TJ "HENRY" YOSHI protocol.
Further interactions with SCP-9995-A instances
On March and April, 2017, Asturian real estate agent Miliano "Nacho" Pina published six blog posts on his personal website related to SCP-9995. In these posts, Nacho described how he used TAS-files provided by BerlinKitty and associates to regularly visit SCP-9995's parallel universes and interact with the SCP-9995-A instances. Relevant sections are presented below.
And now we wait. While we've been able to use savestates to consistently get to this point, savestates don't function for data in parallel universes. If you load a save, your location gets reset to the regular level. Everything inside the parallel universe gets reset as well. It is as though the content of parallel universes isn't stored in the game at all, but I am getting ahead of myself.
[…]
The most interesting part here are the Bobbys. Roaming around these dark zones are creatures without bodies. They just stare at you with two white eyes, and if you look at them too long, they crash your game. We call them Bobbys, because they're cops. They give me a headache.
[…]
Crashing your car into them doesn't do anything. They're intangible to everything except the game's walls and floors. You can drive towards them by toggling to the rear-view camera, but you just drive through them, see them behind you, you'll probably get a bloody nose looking at the glitchy mess, and then your game crashes.
[…]
The weirdest thing I discovered about the Bobbys in my experimenting was that they're not simply attracted to the car. Somehow, they only move when someone is actively looking at the screen. They stay still when you're not looking. Annoyingly, this means you have to stare at the screen while the TAS-file plays out, and even blinking makes the movement desync and the manipulation fail. It's a real mind-boggler and a real pain.
[…]
So you can lure the Bobby into a wall by moving perfectly parallel with it while it's still in its circling state. There's three things you have to keep track of while doing this: 1) You must always be downhill from the Bobby, as it does not switch to its approach phase until it's level with you; 2) You have to make sure your own route doesn't direct you into a wall or ghostrider (which, I remind you, are invisible here); and most importantly 3) You have to know exactly where the Bobby is and where it's going without being able to look at it.
[…]
So now we know the exact places where Bobbys spawn in the parallel universes for Goodsprings, Neon Ion City, and New Sakura. We know that the Bobbys south and west of the center level always circle clockwise around the player. This allows us to set up TAS files that perfectly manipulate the Bobbys in these levels into little nooks or crannies that they cannot get out of, allowing us to freely move around 80% of these dark zones without having to worry about the Bobbys popping into view and crashing your game.
What's the point of all this? Nothing really. There's no easter eggs or anything in the parallel universes. Playing around with the "ghostriders" in these places, you can quickly figure out they're just copies of the non-competing cars in the regular map, so there's nothing interesting there either. I just did all this because I thought it was interesting. There's a certain mystique to the game that we still don't fully understand, and that we probably never will.
Nacho's website was not indexed by Foundation webcrawlers and was not discovered by the Department of Informational Technologies until recently. These blog posts were likely read by fewer than 40 people, including most SCP-9995 persons of interest.
Nacho was found dead in his office from internal cranial hemorrhaging in June 2017.
Turing Completeness
On November 13, 2017, Azerbaijani respiratory therapist Orxan "Orxan G" Guliyev published a 10-minute video on Youtube discussing the Turing completeness of SCP-9995's parallel universes.
Relevant context
Starting in 2013, players discovered non-anomalous methods to build logic circuits within SCP-9995's intended gamespace.
SCP-9995 includes non-racing NPC vehicles that drive predetermined routes across the map. These vehicles follow basic traffic laws (stopping for stop signs and red traffic lights, giving way to oncoming traffic), but serve as unpredictable hazards to racing players. Their behavior is 100% predictable.
When such vehicles are knocked off the road, they can fall into patterns of driving in circles. Notably, they still follow traffic lights that they pass near to. If their path grazes a road, they may follow that road until they hit a streetlight, which may bump them off of the road again and back into a circular pattern.
An intended mechanic (likely an "easter egg") in SCP-9995 is that bumping into a traffic light switches it from red to green or vice versa. Once this is done, it will no longer naturally cycle between its states. This action can be done by both player characters and NPCs.
On March 5, 2014, Assamese substance abuse counselor Amil "BoostX" Phookan published a 31-minute video on Youtube showing off a basic arithmetic logic unit (a full adder) he built using these mechanics. After positioning 31 vehicles (7 racecars, 15 sedans, 3 school busses, 1 limousine, and 1 car hauler) at precise locations and trajectories across the map Neon Ion City, BoostX was able to manipulate the vehicles by hitting specific traffic lights. He showed that he could input two numbers below 4 in binary, and the system would output the sum of these numbers at another intersection before resetting to its previous state.
A partial transcript of relevant sections of Orxan G's slideshow video are presented below:
To keep it simple for the sake of the video, Turing completeness means that, given enough time, this system can theoretically run any program that any other computer can run. All your typical programming languages are Turing complete, as are some weird systems like Microsoft Excel or Minecraft.
[…]
BoostX' video practically already showed that Street King Racing is Turing complete. Certainly, it is merely an adder that can only count up to 6, but it's about the principle. If we had access to more cars, more roads, and more traffic lights, we would in theory be able to build any program we want with this logic, including SKR itself!
This is where discussions of Turing completeness usually end in these types of videos, but SKR is unique. As shown in BerlinKitty's video years ago, SKR features parallel universes that behave in a very unusual manner. These areas in the game include completely independent cars, roads, and traffic lights that do not consume any RAM storage. This shouldn't be possible, and certainly isn't possible. The data used to simulate these regions of the game is probably concealed by some other system, but… let us imagine that SKR actually does have free storage resources.
Infinite resources.
One aspect of the technical definition of Turing completeness is infinite memory. The fact that no physical computer can have infinite RAM is typically glossed over when discussing Turing completeness. However, if SKR really does have regions of the game that provide data storage for no cost, that would make it the first and only true Turing machine.
[…]
A video game is a world. It is a completely separate universe that amazing designers have crafted in a little pocket of our reality. They may have well-realized characters indistinguishable from people, they have their own laws of physics, often video games even have their own internal system of mathematics. Within a video game, you don't measure in meters or seconds, but in pixels and frames. And every game is unique, slightly different from the last.
Is it really impossible that SKR's parallel universes are infinite? If humanity has been building millions of little worlds, is it not inevitable we would, accidentally or on purpose, create something that we cannot fit in our own laws of physics? Remember when WoW removed the entirety of Gravenwall just a few days after players reported that they discovered a fissure that led to a new secret area? Remember that one Pokémon ROM that made the rounds on the internet for apparently making you trip like you're on LSD?
I'm just saying, if we've created tens of millions of little worlds, some of them must have something inexplicable in them. Maybe even most of them, and we just don't know yet.
[…]
There's one big issue that would ruin all this fun. There is no known way to communicate between parallel universes in SKR. Cars continue driving on their set paths and Bobbys freeze in place when the player is not present. The only way to send information from one parallel universe to the next, is by traveling between them yourself. This certainly limits how useful this theoretically infinite space is.
If it's possible to send ghostriders from one universe to another, Street King Racing would be the first ever truly Turing complete system. You could store and process infinite data for infinite potential.
This video was not analyzed by the Department of Informational Technologies.
Group of Interest 9995 log
Foundation-known logs of interactions between the members of GoI-9995 ("SKR Technical Community") began in January 2018. A log relevant to future events is included below.
These logs were recently discovered by the Department of Informational Technologies, and were originally overlooked due to the SMALL DISCORD SERVERS protocol.
Supercomputer
On January 12, 2021, Auvergnat dancer Pierre "La French Gamer" Pierre published a 110-minute video on Youtube in which he shows his process of building an extensive system of memory storage within SCP-9995. Excerpts included below.
So what shall we do now that we can hack any object into the levels? How about a tiny 1 unit by 1 unit cube? Yes, this is a tiny little cube. I even textured it to look bigger than it actually is so we can see it at all! What is the point of the cube, you ask? Well, why not put him right in the path of this oncoming schoolbus?
The bus stops abruptly as it hits the small cube.
We can create hitboxes anywhere now! And giving him a bit of velocity, we can push vehicles around as well. The physics engine handles the rest.
[…]
But if we cannot hack anything directly into the parallel universes, why not just move them there? Here, I have placed a cube in the middle of Goodsprings and I will tell it to move at 500 units per seconds that way. Look at him go! He travels right out of bounds and will someday reach a parallel universe. If I make him go much much faster and tell him to stop after exactly 2 seconds, he will stop exactly in the middle of parallel Goodsprings.
[…]
My biggest concern with my plan was how to communicate between parallel universes. I could make the cubes move when they get hit by cars, but that would be very slow. Luckily, there is a way to instantly communicate between all parallel universes. The traffic signals I mentioned at the start of the video are unlike the cars. They are all synchronized with eachother! When a car hits the traffic signal in this corner of this intersection, all instances of that light instantly change state. We can use this to communicate instantaneously between parallel universes. It may as well be faster-than-light communication!
But I must confess, I have lied to you. The traffic lights aren't entirely instantaneous. It turns out the signals radiate out in a spiral pattern, and after exactly each 2,005 parallel universes, there is a one-frame delay before the next one changes state. This delay is so minuscule that it is hardly measurable, but it helps us to find out exactly where a signal came from, which we need for what we will do next.
[…]
It's hell to set this all up, because we cannot debug the system. If something unexpected happens in a parallel universe, we can try to travel there with a camera, lure away the Bobby with a complicated multi-camera setup, and use another hack that abuses the particle engine to give texture to the invisible hitboxes. One surface polygon at a time. But then what? We find out that the cube we sent out must've been a few units off-course or hit a misalignment differently from what we expected? I am fed up! It is infuriating!
[…]
With this tool, we can convert binary data into tiny cubes that fly in the direction of a parallel universe where they encode this data. It is ingenious and I cannot thank SeverusS and BerlinKitty enough for setting up half of the logic for this system.
As you see, we can just drag a file into the tool, and it immediately begins with generating the cubes. Look at them go! They're so fast! It does take a few minutes to encode the entire song this way, because as we said, we can only have a few hundred cubes in the level at once.
Now that the tool is done, we can delete the original file. It is no longer on my computer! And now I can double click the filename in the tool, and it just generates a few cars to hit the traffic signals in the level. And now we can see the traffic signals go rapidly on their own, and the tool reads out the binary code! And this is where the real magic happens.
"All Star" by Smashmouth begins playing
The file plays! Using data stored in parallel universes!
[…]
While this is still a prototype, I will make a download link to the tool we made available in the description. It should work on Windows 11 and Linux. You can store movies and pictures in the parallel universes yourself, but do remember that closing the game makes you lose all data. It is not yet very practical right now, it is more of a toy, but being able to store terrabytes of data for free and to access any data practically instantly is very very cool.
The linked file was downloaded over 20,000 times before the Department of Informational Technologies took the video and file down (utilizing cover story DMCA COPYRIGHT STRIKE). Reuploads of the file became commonplace and Foundation efforts shifted to minimizing mainstream exposure.
The tool was used in various R&D projects across the world, and because disturbance to these was considered unacceptable to Foundation higher command, containment was limited. Several research projects were launched within the Foundation to investigate the nature of SCP-9995's anomalies from first principles, but these made slow progress.
Prominent members of GoI-9995 avoided Foundation apprehension, possibly through aid of other groups of interest.
Decompilation
On June 29, 2021, Austrian programmer Kitty "BerlinKitty" Morgenstern published an 8-minute video on Youtube about a recent SCP-9995 decompilation project. A transcript is included below.
Hi all. I know I've been AWOL for the past half year, and though I can only say so much about it, I do have some exciting news. The project is finally complete. SeverusS, NoMortalMercy, John Dave Lalonde, HiccupsMcBurpy, and Ali have worked on this for the past three years, and we're now seeing the product of their labor. A complete decompilation of the sourcecode of Street King Racing. We got some help from some people who would rather stay anonymous, but just know that I see you. This has huge implications for every part of the game.
For one part, the modding scene is ecstatic. Friends of mine have built some amazing mods with the tools available to them up to this point, but having access to the code will allow them so much more freedom to build their own levels, vehicles, and game modes. "Adventure"-genre levels were already gaining in popularity and I know that Lalonde said she wanted to make "The Legend of Zelda Except You're a Car." Godspeed to her.
But let's not keep you in suspense any longer, because I know what you're here for. We finally have access to all the code that generates the parallel universes. Except "generates" isn't quite the right word. The actual mechanics are too complicated for me to explain – I'm mostly just a Web developer, the moment you ask me to work with pointers and the stack I'm lost – but apparently the way the code of SKR operates, it actually creates a connection with universes that are literally parallel to our own. Or its own? The game connects with identical instances of itself in other universes and just… connects them.
I cannot even begin to understand the physics significance of this. Why the [bleep] is this in a small racing game from the 2000s? But apparently, according to Mercy, the way the code compiles, this behavior makes perfect sense. They accidentally referenced the LAN-multiplayer script in the code handling geometry and here we are. The software's logic is sound and reproducible. It's wild!
When I first booted up SKR back in 2011, I had no grasp of what the game would mean to me. Hell, back in 2011, I was not in a good place. I was having a very rough time. I was sleeping on a friend's couch, I lost access to my meds for months, my future looked exceedingly hopeless. I was convinced at some point that I was not going to live to see my 20s.
My friend's old-ass Dell laptop just ran basically three games: Space Cadet Pinball, Zoo Tycoon, and SKR. I didn't realize at first how good the racing game was. It looks like ass of course, but the mechanics have always been beautiful in their simplicity. The online leaderboards is really what made it special. Grinding for the best times, breaking new barriers, finding skips and glitches, it kept me going. It took me a year to actually join the forum, but I felt part of the community just by submitting my results and watching other people's replays.
This game is really important to me. It probably literally saved my life, and the friends I made through it mean the world to me. Even if a few of them no longer remember me.
Things got really hectic about a week after French released their video and people started realizing we actually broke the laws of physics with the game. There weren't any big news stories, but we got tons of emails and messages. Luckily, we got help from another online community. But my life was shaken up again in ways I can't really talk about on this channel. I had to abandon the home I had built for myself in the past five years. It was rough, but it's good to be among friends and to be able to work together on projects like these.
But know, we will keep exploring this game. I think there are secrets to it that we are yet to discover. Because the PUs are not in the sourcecode, we still don't have a full understanding of the Bobbys, for example. And I don't think it's going to end here. French is having a closer look at an old mystery bug in Harvest Moon 64, and Hiccups is trying to get a weird cartridge just labeled "TotleighSoft" to run. I want to keep making videos, and I'm excited at all there is to uncover.
Anyway, there's a link to the SKR sourcecode in the description. Let's just assume Awe Arcade doesn't copyright strike me to try to take it down, haha. Information wants to be free, and I'll do my best for that.
SCP-9995 and 26 similar SCP objects are pending reclassification to "Explained".
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