The Backrooms

Overview

The Backrooms are an extremely odd and profound anomaly, that being a realm that defies the very foundations of the Multiverse and the rigid laws of conventional Spacetime. They sprawl outward in a vast, labyrinthine expanse that stretches far beyond the boundaries of The Hub, that central nexus where we are located, where all of existence is located. This place is no mere void or forgotten corner of existence. Instead, it forms an immense, ever-shifting maze that encircles The Hub like a colossal, menacing halo, its corridors twisted and contorted in ways that no sane mind could ever map, with its origins remain veiled in absolute enigma. To some, it functions as a deliberate punishment, a brutal gauntlet designed to break those who dare to push against the limits of reality in their quest for transcendence. To others, it is nothing more than a cruel accident; a trap that snags unwary travelers who accidentally tear through the fragile weave of existence during their journeys across the cosmos or even during their own mundane, usual lives. Whatever its true intent, the Backrooms stand as a testament to the Multiverse's hidden perils, a domain where the ordinary rules of space, time, and sanity unravel into something far more sinister.

Across countless universes, those civilizations fortunate or unfortunate enough to glimpse the truth of the Backrooms weave its essence into their deepest lore. Ancient myths, whispered tales around flickering fires, and elaborate stories passed down through generations all attempt to capture its horror. In some worlds, bards sing of endless yellow halls that swallow souls whole. In others, scholars in shadowed libraries scribble frantic warnings about a place where reality frays at the edges. Yet these fictional accounts, grand and exaggerated as they often are, pale against the stark truth. Some popular legends might speak of thousands upon thousands of interconnected levels, like a whole ecosystem that thrives parallel to our reality. But, in the cold light of reality, the Backrooms are a singular stucture of some kind, that only really feels like it has "levels" the longer one is unlucky enough to have an extended stay.

The Yellow Maze: The Liminal Realm of Infinite Ambiguity

When wanderers first tumble into the Backrooms, they almost invariably awaken within what's most commonly referred to as the Yellow Maze. What begins as the archetypal nightmare of endless monotonous corridors soon reveals itself as something far stranger... A living palimpsest of existence itself, endlessly rewriting and remembering.

At its most stable and common form, the maze presents the classic vision burned into Multiversal folklore; an infinite warren of faded, sickly yellow wallpapered hallways. Fluorescent tubes buzz overhead in a relentless, bone-vibrating hum that never quite fades. The carpet underfoot is damp and musty, reeking of old rot and forgotten neglect. The air feels thick, stagnant, as though it has been breathed by countless souls before you and will outlast you by eons. Walls stretch on with maddening repetition, corners turning into identical junctions that mock any sense of progress. It is simultaneously vast beyond comprehension and claustrophobically intimate; a non-place that presses against the mind until sanity begins to fray at the edges.

To many who are unfortunate enough to find themselves in the Backrooms, the maze and it's very appearance can be extremely alien, and if anything, it shouldn't even exist. Not just because of it's nature, again, but because of how it looks. It undeniably looks like a cheap, low-quality office building adjacent to that of a location on the planet Earth in the late 20th century, or perhaps visually dull and generic enough to be interpreted as a location from any number of civilizations across the Multiverse. But, it still doesn't make sense, since the Backrooms have existed long before the existence of Earth, and long before the existence of any civilization that could have possibly created such an aesthetic. Almost like whenever the Backrooms were created, it must have created a time paradox or anomoly of some unvariable kind, where the maze's default appearance would appear as such regardless of when it was created. It strongly suggests the flow of time in the Backrooms is either non-linear, irrelevant, or truly beyond any mortal comprehension.

Yet this "default" yellow office-building aesthetic is only the surface. The longer one wanders, the more the maze seems to remember and reconfigure. The environment itself shifts gradually, sometimes subtly and sometimes with jarring abruptness, as if the realm has dreamed fragments of all that has ever was.

One might round a corner to find a cluster of mismatched furniture from a thousand dead universes from long ago, or a Victorian armchair next to alien crystalline seating. Perhaps a desk covered in paperwork written in languages that no longer exist and aren't even accurate. These artifacts feel half-remembered, as though the maze has imperfectly reconstructed them from the minds and ruins of those who passed through before across time.

Deeper in, it's said that things appear to be morphed into spaces that defy categorization. A flooded subway platform from a civilization that never even invented trains, or what looks like an endless school hallway lit by bioluminescent growths. Maybe even hotel lobbies suspended in void, their chandeliers floating, with windows of a night sky, shining stars from universes that have long died away. These areas blend the banal with the incomprehensible, always retaining that core liminal unease, that sense of "this place was meant for something, but the purpose has been erased."

It's said by survivors that know more about the true nature of the Backrooms that it almost exists as a graveyard or a museum of all of existence. It's a place where the echoes of countless realities, even if it's as mundane as a single chair or a singular hallway based off someone's bedroom, a someone from a universe that existed tens of trillions or even quintillions of years ago. They are all there, somewhere in the Backrooms. Either they no-clipped there, or they were remembered there.

Navigating the Backrooms: Levels, Sub-levels, and Escape

While the maze's shifting structure and tendacy to morph or collide and form additional bizzare areas and locations, there are some general patterns that have been observed by those who have made it out, describing these areas as "sub-levels". While the exact number of sub-levels is unknown, survivors throughout the eons have consistently reported areas that feel distinct from the core of the maze, such as what appears to be a birthday party known as "Level Fun", or a pool-like area with water known as "The Poolrooms". Of course, it's unknown if sub-levels are actually distinct areas, or if they are just manifestations of the maze's tendency to morph and remember, but the overwhelming amount of reports on these alleged areas seems to suggest the latter.

Navigating the Backrooms is no easy feat. It's almost like the made itself was designed to disorient and make no logical sense, like it was made by a group of architects who just snorted crack and then designed a building. The maze's layout and stucture are deliberately confusing, with corridors that loop back on themselves, staircases that sometimes don't even lead anywhere, dead-ends to be possibly cornered in, and of course the layout of the batshit insane "remembered" areas that can be completely random and unpredictable to literally anyone. There is no conventional way to traverse without getting lost, and even the most experienced wanderers can find themselves hopelessly stuck in an area they have no memory of entering, with no landmarks in sight to guide them back.

In the Backrooms, death is final, extinguishing the soul permanently and erasing any trace of existence, rendering revival completely impossible. This fate compels wanderers to exercise extreme caution in seeking an escape, either by finding an elevator or by "no-clipping" out of the Backrooms altogether. However, these methods are rare, and even success can lead to disorientation and more often than not, a fate that is often worse than being in the Backrooms itself. Exits that do open more often than not can open into any random place in the Multiverse; a realm, a dimension, a universe, and much worse, a completely random point in time. You could find yourself back in your own universe, but 10 million years in the past, or 100 million years in the future. You could find yourself in a completely different universe, on a random planet with air you can't even breathe, or in a dimension where the laws of physics are so beyond you, that you just die immediately. You could see colors you've never seen before, witness phenomena that defy your own science, or even find yourself in a place that is so alien and incomprehensible that your mind just breaks and you die of a mental breakdown. The Backrooms' exits are as unpredictable and dangerous as the maze itself. To find an exit with no strings attached is about as rare as finding an exit in the first place. Luck is truly never on your side when your unfortunate enough to be in a situation as hopeless as the realm beyond reality's edge.

Entering the Backrooms: A Journey into the Impossible

Of course, accessing the Backrooms, and thus confirming its existence as more than mere myth or fevered tall tale is nothing short of a cosmic improbability, bordering on the absurd. This realm lurks utterly beyond the fabric of space and time; it is, in the most literal sense, a realm that defies existence itself, a shadow cast by the Multiverse's own architecture. Yet, for all its inaccessibility, there are only two known methods to breach its thresholds, with one being the sole pathway remotely achievable... If "achievable" stretches the word to its breaking point.

The primary method, sometimes known commonly by commonfolk as "no-clipping," is recognized by scientists and reality-weavers alike as quantum tunneling: A quantum mechanical quirk where particles, atoms, or entire beings slip through energy barriers that classical physics deems impenetrable. Lacking the requisite energy to crest the wall, the object phases through it anyway, defying logic and probability. In the context of the Multiverse however, this can manifest further as "phasing out of reality," a catastrophic glitch that ejects the unfortunate from the woven tapestry of existence, hurling them into the void beyond, straight into the clutches of the Backrooms.

Yet quantum tunneling, especially on a macroscopic scale for sentient beings, is not merely rare; it is a statistical phantom, passively occurring with a likelihood roughly on the order of 1 in 10⁶⁰ per lifetime under normal conditions. Such odds render accidental entry a freak occurrence, a roll of dice across near infinities where failure is the only constant.

This begs the inevitable question: How? How do civilizations or anyone at all know of the Backrooms? The answer lies in the staggering immensity of reality itself, a canvas so vast that even the most infinitesimal probabilities bloom into certainties over eons. The Multiverse, as we know, is 21 duotrigintillion (2.1 x 10¹⁰⁰) years old and spans a diameter of 14.5 duotrigintillion (1.45 x 10¹⁰⁰) gigaparsecs. So of course, it has birthed and consumed countless realities in its interminable expanse. Though it has encapsulated only hundreds to thousands of universes at any given moment, the relentless churn of creation and destruction over its lifetime suggests far more have flickered in and out of being.

To try and grasp the scale, consider this estimation: Assuming an average universe endures for about 10 billion years, the Multiverse's age implies roughly 10⁹⁰ generations of universes have risen and fallen. With approximately 10³ universes (NOT counting the alternate realities) coexisting at any time, the total number of universes ever to exist swells to around 10⁹³.

Within each universe, sentient life proliferates on an astronomical scale. Drawing from familiar cosmic benchmarks. A typical universe boasting 10¹¹ galaxies, each with 10¹¹ stars, and conservatively assuming 10²⁰ inhabited systems where civilizations thrive, the total beings per universe, across all generations and epochs, might reach 10³² (factoring in 10¹² individuals per system over time). Thus, the grand total of sentient entities to have ever existed across the Multiverse climbs to an incomprehensible 10¹²⁵.

Despite the odds of quantum tunneling being vanishingly small at 1 in 10⁶⁰ per being, multiplying this against 10¹²⁵ souls yields approximately 10⁶⁵ individuals who have inadvertently no-clipped into the Backrooms over the aeons. Survival, however, is another abyss entirely. The Backrooms' merciless design ensures that escape is a miracle squared. Estimating a survival and return rate of perhaps 1 in 10⁶⁰, the number of those who have glimpsed its depths, clawed their way out, and lived to whisper warnings dwindles to about 10⁵... A mere hundred thousand scattered across dimensions and timelines.

These rare survivors, emerging disoriented into random corners of the Multiverse, become the seeds of legend: Fragmented accounts etched into ancient tomes, encoded in tons of folklore, or just shared in groups among the curious enough to listen. Their tales, distorted by trauma and transmission, fuel the myths that echo through civilizations, a faint but persistent reminder of the peril lurking just beyond reality's fragile veil.

Of course, it's only an extremely rough estimation and the math most likely isn't truly accurate, but it serves to give an idea as to how there's documentation on the Backrooms in first place. It's something not normally achieveable, but, it surely can happen to someone extremely unlucky.

However, the likely scientific method of entry is more than definitely not the only way to access the Backrooms. Other universes have brute forced methods such as the Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System, a device that tore through the fabric of reality to create a stable portal to the Backrooms, when then allegedly destabilized their dimension enough to a point that various other entry points to the Backrooms appeared across their world. But such methods are extremely rare, and the Backrooms' very nature seems to resist any attempts at controlled access, as if it is a realm that simply does not want to be found, a place that exists in spite of itself, a shadow that clings to the edges of existence and slips away whenever one tries to grasp it.

The Purpose of the Backrooms: A Mystery Beyond Reason

The purpose of the Backrooms lies shrouded in questions as vast as its endless halls, with speculation as dark and intricate as its shadowy passages. While countless myths across cultures depict the Backrooms as a primordial terror meant to ensnare wanderers, others believe they embody an ancient fear; one which transcends all beings across space and time. For those aware of its existence, it's a source of legends, urban myths and even just a joke, something obviously fake to the average mortal who does not believe in the existence of such. But among the few who claim to know the ancient secrets of creation itself, another possibility arises, one that resonates like a secret chord woven into the fabric of reality.

Some say that the Backrooms were crafted as a labyrinth, a maze spun to encircle a single, sacred space; the TV Room. A legendary place known only to the few whom were closest to The Creator.

This white, almost sterile room, if it exists, is said to hold a single object at its center: an old, possibly even Earth-made television, frozen in static, emitting nothing but a soft, flickering light and the sound of white noise. This apparent TV, ancient and untouched, is often believed to contain a portal, a threshold where the Creator himself might have just have vanished from the Multiverse, leaving behind a realm devoid of any intervention, a realm governed by the chaotic nature of existence. What lies beyond the TV remains a total unexplainable mystery; perhaps it's the Creator's final destination, or perhaps it's the point of no return, a place beyond creation, and probably beyond destruction too.

Yet even this theory, shared only among the few closest to the Creator's knowledge, remains as intangible as the shifting walls of the Backrooms. The TV Room's existence is questioned as often as it is feared, for if it is real, it represents an ending beyond endings, a final halt to the journey through the Multiverse, a space that could unravel the last threads of comprehension. For some, it's a haunting curiosity, a reminder that even those closest to the truth are ensnared by mystery; for others, it represents the threshold of oblivion, a place so ultimate in its silence that it becomes indistinguishable from the idea of the Creator's absence, a door beyond which lies nothing but the endless void left by His departure.

This room, if it even exists, would take ages upon ages to reach, traversing infinite spaces and enduring untold horrors. Every step through the Backrooms would wear down even the most resilient mind, testing one's resolve until reality itself becomes a hazy blur. Reaching this place would signify the end of the line, the last point within existence's cruel maze. And yet, if one were to finally stand in this stark, pale room, with that single flickering TV before them, the ultimate question would remain: is it truly an ending? Or is it the beginning of the end?

To face the TV in the vast, timeless void of the Backrooms is to confront the reality of existence itself. Perhaps the TV Room isn't merely the end, but the last point where questions can still exist. Perhaps, beyond it, lies the answer that renders all things, all worlds, and all realities irrelevant; a final truth so complete that it transcends our understanding of life and death alike. But even so, while the TV Room remains a theory, an enigma to those who speak of it, it stands as the ultimate possibility of a final, fragile border between everything we know and the unknowable silence that waits beyond.