Downwarp

Downwarp is one of the six warps of the Puzzlebox, a run-down metropolis where nothing holds together without effort. Its inhabitants enjoy the challenge, banding together in tribes and scavenging out a satisfying lifestyle by creativity, tenacity, and direct work with the world and powers that surround them.

Environment

The extents of Downwarp are hard to determine; while there never seems to be any lack of space, the cityscape itself gives the impression of being just a floor in an incomprehensibly large skyscraper. The light of day is always burnished by dust, indirect and indistinct. It shines only at low angles and is shot through with angular shadows. Sometimes there are flashes of what looks like sunlight, but only in reflection off some of the larger and more-intact city towers. At night, the streetlights come on, everywhere, painting the sky a warm sodium orange. The loglo from far streets and towers (and, perhaps, the unseen ceiling) stands in for stars.

One might ordinarily expect a ruined city to be something of a wasteland, but that's not the case in Downwarp. Life is one of the best fighters of entropy, after all, and that's definite in evidence in the overgrown parks, vine-covered walls, and lots gone to seed that can be found in Downwarp. Some inhabitants have even taken up farming, in small rooftop gardens and boulevard strips and whatever other places things can take root.

Visitors from outside the 'Box sometimes recognize streets and landmarks in the ruins of Downwarp, but only in small parts, as if the city is formed out of bits and pieces of other places, all jumbled together. It's not clear how this happens, if the Downwarp versions are copies or actual stolen streets, or if inhabitants sometimes come along with the architecture. Look hard enough and you'll find witnesses and evidence for all these interpretations.

Metaphysics

Downwarp features a few distinct deviations from the standard baseline Puzzlebox reality. Most obviously, entropy seems to run a bit stronger (or at least stranger) in Downwarp compared to other areas. The city itself seems far more run down than anywhere else in the 'Box, and despite the theoretical infinite resources and capabilities of the residents, it stays that way. It seems that the bigger and more elaborate a structure is, the more likely it is to quickly wear down to a state of disrepair, often still useful for some purpose, but never the original intention.

The same effect also effects the instantiator system in Downwarp; while the instantiator is never particularly effective at creating complex or well-built objects, on Downwarp it seems to be able to create little else than raw materials; its maximum resolution is around one centimeter, so it can create bulk iron or silicon or food paste, but anything more elaborate must either be crafted or salvaged.

In fact, Downwarp seems to be a never-ending font of useful salvage. It seems that no matter how many times a particular abandoned building or collapsed freeway has been searched, there’s always a chance that someone will find something interesting by scrounging further, though it may need some repair work; it is salvage, after all. By the same token, there's no guarantee any person will find something that meets their immediate needs, so swap meets and flea markets are constant, and alway full of fascinating finds. Outwarp researchers have suggested that the salvage economy is actually secretly enabled by the instantiation system, creating the salvage unseen and placing it to be found. Downwarpers don't usually see it that way, but then again the common sentiment to explain good salvage is "The City provides."

Animism is a common approach to life in Downwarp, and there's more to it than just where salvage comes from. Most inhabitants will at least acknowledge spirits and powers as having a hand in their lives, and some work with them directly, asking for insight, advice, or even direct help in their endeavors. As with salvage, outsiders sometimes attribute this to simply being a strange way of accessing the datasphere, but the response from Downwarpers is that they know perfectly well how to use the datasphere too, and explaining the difference is totally pointless if someone is going to try to write everything off as 'primitive quirks'.

Sociology

The ambient ontological pressure that keeps Downwarp from building itself up into a bustling metropolis works on social structures as much as physical ones. Large group dynamics don't hold together, but the locals seem quite content to avoid them anyway, instead congregating in small tribes and intentional families, usually with no more than a few dozen members. A tribe will settle down in a particular city block or high-rise floor, building it up according to their own personal aesthetics and letting new members come and go as mood and ideology dictate.

As such, Downwarp factions tend to be fairly loosely affiliated, existing more as general belief systems than organized movements. The two most well-known are the Gridshamans, urban mystics who believe that everything, natural or constructed, is tied together in a network of willfull energy, and the Eisenstimmen, strong-willed workers devoted to improving their bodies as much as their collectives need, to help them bear the burden of sustaining them.

Inhabitants

• Aleph
• Arc-Light
• Groove-Weld
• Nikolai
• Scuff
• Torque

Inspiration

• Writing
  • Bone Dance, by Emma Bull - One of the best syntheses of magic and technology ever to have been given the label urban fantasy, it's about the search for identity in a ruined future Minneapolis where the Lwa are just as real as the body-hopping psychics.
  • The City, Not Long After, by Pat Murphy - Post-plague urban collapse narrative involving San Francisco housing a collective of dreamers and artists, defending it against militaristic invaders via creative and surreal means.
• Music
  • Burial - Dark as a city-wide blackout, but with rich and complex layers of bass and modified vocal samples that are never boring to listen to. It's been called dubstep, but it's like no other dubstep you've ever heard.
  • The KLF - Down-and-dirty situationist house musicians who'd rather burn a million pounds on a beach than let success make them boring.
  • The Shamen - Perhaps no one was more serious about making rave culture into a spiritual experience. And "Techno-tribal, positively primal, shamanic anarchistic archaic revival"? That might as well be Downwarp's motto.
  • Dead Cities by Future Sound of London - More than most of FSOL's catalog, this album's pretty close to Downwarp's slightly grungier and ruinous side. Starts out a little more agressive, but fades into more ambient work towards the latter half.