Puzzlebox

Once, somewhere off in the vastness of time and space, hung the Puzzlebox, a planned community as big as a galaxy that perfectly catered to all the needs of posthuman (and post-alien) life. The beings there never wanted for anything; they had all the space they could ever use, all their needs were provided for, and an elaborate system of picotech streaming backups ensured that even death was a thing of the past. But, on the whole, it was also a bit boring… with one Messy exception.

Standing out from the simple seedworlds and predictably-comfortable leisure concourses was a tangle of concept and aesthetic seemingly constantly in tension; six realms stretched along three ideological axes where creatures far beyond the imagination of even most of the Puzzlebox’s residents made spectacles of creativity and conflict and carnality. Others could not help but call these gloriously twisted places the Warps:

• Downwarp - Castoff ruins from a cyberpunk metropolis, beset by entropy but held together by tribes of artists and mystics
• Upwarp - A perfectly-symmetrical technocratic metropolis devoted to the best impulses of science and rationalism
• Bottomwarp - An endless autonomous street festival full of partiers whose only taboo is shame itself
• Topwarp - A patchwork landscape of arcane order, inhabited by beings dedicated to personal excellence and utmost discretion
• Charmwarp - A high-saturation fantasyland of whimsical creatures buoyed aloft by exuberant ambition
• Strangewarp - A twisted reflection of an elegant city, filled with all those things that most folks would rather not think about.

No one was sure why the Puzzlebox made the Mess of Warps. Were they an art project? A joke? A place to toss those who didn’t fit elsewhere in the system? A sign that the ‘Box’s vast mind was at odds with itself? Even the denizens of the Mess didn’t know, or much care, they had much more fun exploring all the possibilities that their six strange spheres offered them.

And then one day, in a sudden Fracturing moment, the answer became perfectly clear: The Mess was an egg.

There was no warning when the Warps cracked apart, sending their fragments hurtling through the posthuman cosmos like unplanned colony vessels. Cut off from each other, the larger pieces of the Warps began to develop in new ways, and smaller fragments found themselves embedded among the relatively-staid neighborhoods of the Greater Puzzlebox. Confusion and curiosity alike began to spread, as the formerly-confined weirdness of the Mess could was now scattered far and wide across their worlds.

But all that was barely worth a mention compared to what was left in the place that used to be the heart of the Mess. A neon aurora of non-space roiled and curled, and reached out across the cosmos and beyond. It stretched ana and kata, dextro and levo, toward places and creatures as odd and diverse as those found in the Mess that birthed it, and linked them together. When it was done, oddities from across the multiverse were connected both to each other and to the Puzzlebox:

• The 12Fold Resorts, a theme-park version of the Sol System, where each planet has become its own playground for a particular set of desires.
• The Oneiropolis, a fantastical reflection of every city ever built, its sky always full of countless stars and its streets always full of hopeful dreamers.
• The Spanning Tree, a grand structure growing between the stars in defiance of cold entropy and distance.
• A cozy nature preserve whose inhabitants are often far from natural.
• A digital dance-club tucked away inside an old mainframe, its dance-floor filled with both hackers and the conscious programs they modify.

…and so many other things meeting or surpassing the diversity of the fractured Mess. These too were tangled up with all the other bits of the Puzzlebox, and slowly, the whole place began to change.

How could it not, with all those new influences all amongst them, impossible to ignore? Some inhabitants pulled away, holing up in their comfortable spaces, but others reached out, joined the new arrivals, and started making wondrous things of their own. Soon it was hard to tell what had been pulled in by the fracturing of the Warps, and what had grown on its own, inspired by second-hand stories, or simply the zeitgeist of possibility set free.

And so, the Puzzlebox birthed itself anew, a place of possibility and exploration, full of varied vistas waiting to be explored, discovered, or created.

See Also

• Factions
• Glossary
• Archival Information