Puzzlebox

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.

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.

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.

The Warps

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.

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.

• Downwarp - A cyberpunkish urban ruin filled with wild-eyed artists and mystics.
• Upwarp - A clinical technocratic society devoted to humanistic science and rationalism.
• Strangewarp - A twisted mirror-image of an elegant city, turned inside-out by all those things that most folks would rather not think about.
• Charmwarp - A fantasyland of bright colors, whimsical creatures, and wide-eyed innocence.
• Bottomwarp - An endless street festival where shame (and clothing) are virtually unknown, and where kinky behavior and hippie-ish values predominate.
• Topwarp - An aristocratic land of palaces and estates, whose inhabitants are devoted to craftsbeingship and personal development.

Life in the Puzzlebox

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'.

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.

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.

Current Events

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.

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.

Factions

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.

• Architects of the Future/Archives (archival information)
• Bonobians
• Bubbledolls/Archives (archival information)
• Chitin Queens/Archives (archival information)
• Eisenstimmen/Archives (archival information)
• Fever Cathedral/Archives (archival information)
• Gridshamans
• Hemotopians/Archives (archival information)
• Modulari
• Neo-Boreals/Archives (archival information)
• Neovictorians/Archives (archival information)
• Plurals/Archives (archival information)
• Strange Medical Corps

Other Places

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.

• Cube Tree Plaza
• Transit Nexus
• The Museum