Difference between revisions of "Puzzlebox"

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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.
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The Puzzlebox is an arbitrarily large, arbitrarily old, arbitrarily weird region of the Mess, an even larger, older, but rather less weird transhuman habitat. Most of the Mess is et up as a fairly mundane, unchallenging, comfortable existence for any sentient, offering freedom from death and want.  
 
  
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The Puzzlebox has the same conveniences overall; no one need die or go homeless or hungry, but unlike the rest of the Mess, it's divided into vastly different areas, each one seeming to have its own very forceful personality. Each of these six Warps, as they're called, has slightly different rules of reality from each other and the rest of the universe, that support their own particular ways of life. Given its oddness by the general standards of the surrounding habitat, most Mess denizens look at the Puzzlebox as down-rent property, generally to be avoided.
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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:
  
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However, another thing that makes the Puzzlebox different is that it seems to have a will of its own, and a penchant for collecting. Strange immigrants are common there, from far-flung areas of the Mess and from other realities entirely. Many of them aren't even sure how they got there. In general, there's nothing keeping them from leaving again, but those that the Puzzlebox chooses seem to tend to find a place there, preferring it to wherever they came from.
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* [[Upwarp]] - A perfectly-symmetrical technocratic metropolis devoted to the best impulses of science and rationalism
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* [[Downwarp]] - Castoff ruins from a cyberpunk metropolis, beset by entropy but held together by tribes of artists and mystics
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* [[Strangewarp]] - A twisted reflection of an elegant city, filled with all  those things that most folks would rather not think about
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* [[Charmwarp]] - A high-saturation fantasyland of whimsical creatures buoyed aloft by exuberant ambition
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* [[Bottomwarp]] - An endless autonomous street festival full of partiers whose only taboo is shame itself
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* [[Topwarp]] - A patchwork landscape of arcane order, inhabited by beings dedicated to personal excellence and utmost discretion
  
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== The Warps ==
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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.  
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The Puzzlebox is divided into six warps, three pairs, each named after a flavor of quark. Each warp seems to be as big as it needs to be, but borders between them can be found as well, the particular reality of one warp bleeding into another in the far reaches. There are rumors of other places too, specific junctions between two or even three warps, but details on these are sketchy at best.
 
  
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[[Warp Metaphysics|There are countless ways to divide and characterize the six warps]], the following listing simply uses the masses of the corresponding quarks to provide an ordering.
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And then one day, in a sudden [[The Fracturing|Fracturing]] moment, the answer became perfectly clear: The Mess was an egg.
  
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* [[Downwarp]] - A cyberpunkish urban ruin filled with wild-eyed artists and mystics.
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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.
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* [[Upwarp]] - A clinical technocratic society devoted to humanistic science and rationalism.
 
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* [[Strangewarp]] - A twisted mirror-image of an elegant city, turned inside-out by all those things that most folks would rather not think about.
 
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* [[Charmwarp]] - A fantasyland of bright colors, whimsical creatures, and wide-eyed innocence.
 
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* [[Bottomwarp]] - An endless street festival where shame (and clothing) are virtually unknown, and where kinky behavior and hippie-ish values predominate.
 
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* [[Topwarp]] - An aristocratic land of palaces and estates, whose inhabitants are devoted to craftsbeingship and personal development.
 
  
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== Life in the Puzzlebox ==
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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:
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As a transhuman habitat, the Puzzlebox provides a number of conveniences. There's the Backup System, which constantly scans inhabitants' bodies and minds and, if they suffer fatal physical damage, restores them intact at a nearby safe location. There's also the Instantiator, which allows inhabitants to create simple objects, including anything needed for sustenance and shelter, with only a thought. Strangest of all, there's the Consent Maintenance System, which seems to prevent (or at least mitigate) anything happening to someone that they don't (by some definition) 'want'.
 
  
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<span style="color: purple">From an out-of-character perspective, this all basically means that MUCK rules are physical laws there; you can't die (unless you want to), you can make whatever you want as long as you spend the mental effort, and usually you're the one who determines what happens to you, via your own poses.</span>
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* 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.
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* 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.
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* The Spanning Tree, a grand structure growing between the stars in defiance of cold entropy and distance.
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* A cozy nature preserve whose inhabitants are often far from natural.
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* A digital dance-club tucked away inside an old mainframe, its dance-floor filled with both hackers and the conscious programs they modify.
  
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These make physical combat essentially superfluous (or at least clearly recreational), but that doesn't make the Puzzlebox free of conflict entirely. Instead, the way that Puzzlebox inhabitants contend is through memetics and propaganda, what is sometimes called 'artwar'. Over Puzzlebox's long history, factions have formed, along ideological and aesthetic lines, and they're always vying with each other to win converts and influence. New inhabitants are particuarly prized; convincing someone from somewhere else that your way of life is the right one brings with it a lot of prestige.
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…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.
  
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=== Current Events ===
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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.
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Once, the warps were all connected via the [[Transit Nexus]] and its Magic Mirror, but at some point in the relatively recent past, something changed. The greater Genius Loci of the Puzzlebox seems to have changed, or simply lost interest; not much has happened, and the connections between Warps, and in and out of the Puzzlebox itself, have broken down, leaving some inhabitants stranded outwarp or outbox, and the rest a bit worried about whether the backup system or the instantiator will be next to fail.
 
  
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More recently, contact has been made between [[Downwarp]] and the [[Oneiropolis]], allowing a bit of travel between that warp and other [[valences]]. Further experimentation inside Downwarp has given some hints that they may be able to re-establish contact with other places, as long as an inhabitant from each other warp can be found to help lead the way back.
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And so, the Puzzlebox birthed itself anew, a place of possibility and exploration, full of varied vistas waiting to be explored, discovered, or created.
  
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=== Factions ===
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=== See Also ===
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This is a necessarily incomplete list; factions form and fragment constantly, and there's plenty of disagreement even within factions as to who belongs and who doesn't.
 
  
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* [[Architects of the Future/Archives|Architects of the Future]]†
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* [[Puzzlebox/Factions|Factions]]
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* [[Bonobians]]
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* [[Puzzlebox/Glossary|Glossary]]
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* [[Bubbledolls/Archives|Bubbledolls]]†
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* [[:Category:Puzzlebox Archives|Archival Information]]
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* [[Chitin Queens/Archives|Chitin Queens]]†
 
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* [[Eisenstimmen/Archives|Eisenstimmen]]†
 
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* [[Fever Cathedral/Archives|Fever Cathedral]]†
 
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* [[Gridshamans]]
 
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* [[Hemotopians/Archives|Hemotopians]]†
 
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* [[Modulari]]
 
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* [[Neo-Boreals/Archives|Neo-Boreals]]†
 
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* [[Neovictorians/Archives|Neovictorians]]†
 
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* [[Plurals/Archives|Plurals]]†
 
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* [[Strange Medical Corps]]
 
  
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† archival information
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[[Category:Syncosms]] [[Category:Puzzlebox]] [[Category:Postfurry MUCK]]
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== Other Places ==
 
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Puzzlebox is generally synonymous with the Warps, but there are always edge cases. These locations are undeniably inside the Puzzlebox, but also just as clearly don't belong to any particular warp.
 
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* [[Cube Tree Plaza]]
 
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* [[Transit Nexus]]
 
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* [[The Museum]]
 
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[[Category:Syncosms]] [[Category:Puzzlebox]]
 

Latest revision as of 13:41, 8 November 2024

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:

  • Upwarp - A perfectly-symmetrical technocratic metropolis devoted to the best impulses of science and rationalism
  • Downwarp - Castoff ruins from a cyberpunk metropolis, beset by entropy but held together by tribes of artists and mystics
  • Strangewarp - A twisted reflection of an elegant city, filled with all those things that most folks would rather not think about
  • Charmwarp - A high-saturation fantasyland of whimsical creatures buoyed aloft by exuberant ambition
  • 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

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

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