SCP-259

SCP-259 SCP-259 is a fractal image called the Weisenglass Spiral. Finish rendering it, and it opens a portal. The size and orientation of the image influence where that portal goes, and the destinations the Foundation has encountered are spectacularly bad places to connect to an occupied building. One rendering opens into a region containing plasma estimated at twenty million Kelvin. Another leads into deep space near a black hole. Another releases enormous venomous cockroaches. The Foundation is still trying to understand why this particular image has the effect and whether other images can do something similar. The first major incident involves a graduate student who buys a disc of printable fractals and takes it back to a university residence hall. The resulting explosion and fire have characteristics that make investigators think of a small fusion event. The student and other victims are vaporized. Survivor accounts about the disc eventually give the Foundation something to trace. They confiscate forty-one copies from the seller and warn publicly that the software contains a computer-destroying virus. The seller says the discs came from a reseller's bankruptcy sale, and the original producer can't be identified. At that point, the file leaves open whether the software was distributed innocently or with knowledge of what it could do. A later attack removes that uncertainty for at least one group. Somebody displays a roughly ten-meter-square version of the image on a stadium screen during a soccer game. About sixty thousand people are present. A portal opens, and venomous cockroaches weighing about two kilograms each pour out and attack the crowd. The insects cannot survive more than two hours in Earth's atmosphere, which puts an eventual limit on the incident. That does very little for the people in the stadium during those two hours. Some living specimens are collected and maintained in a higher-oxygen environment for study. An organization later claims responsibility for displaying the image. The Foundation's experiments show that merely changing the rendering can produce very different results. In a remote desert test, a battery-powered computer completes the image and a luminous portal releases superheated plasma. Doubling the image size in a later experiment produces a dark portal that pulls in nearby matter. An inverted version causes another event whose details are withheld, followed by a quarantine for multiple anomalous entities. One observation matters a lot: the image works without a person directly watching it. You don't need someone to look at the spiral and misunderstand it or become hypnotized. Completing the rendering is enough. That makes the software itself something they have to control, along with the images it can produce. The Foundation retains a program on disc for approved research and has a task force assigned to recover other copies. Any testing has to happen far from inhabited areas. Once the means of generating the image has circulated, though, controlling one disc in a vault only addresses a small part of the problem. This is a particularly nasty use of digital distribution. A file that sounds like an innocuous collection of mathematical pictures can reach a dorm room or a stadium display. The same underlying pattern can produce very different disasters depending on how it is rendered, and the researchers still haven't established enough of the rules to make experimenting with it routine. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-259