Puzzlebox/Glossary

Faction

Groups of subcultural and ideological affiliation, devoted to spreading their sense of style; factions roughly take the place of ethnicities and nations in the Mess, and levels of participation range from casual fashion affectations to ritualized daily devotions to a faction's lifestyle.

Fashion War

The predominant form of cultural conflict in the Mess, in which various factions attempt to popularize their ideology through propaganda, psychotronic devices, guerrilla theater, graffiti, performance art, and so forth. (aka "Art War," "Poetic Terrorism," "Meme War")

Imipolex

A putty-like computing medium that can also act as a display. (aka "flickercladding")

Imilexene

An nth-generation descendent of rubber and imipolex; an artificial resin seeded with a parasapient magic mirror preparation that allows it to reshape itself instantly and respond to the desires of its user via voice command or neural impulse.

Instantiator

A device or system which creates objects on demand from a base material. Puzzlebox's instantiator system is built into the atmosphere and allows most sentients to summon material objects of reasonable complexity at will. Item templates of high craftsmanship or very specific function are deliberately disabled, for the sake of the local artisan communities. (aka "matter compiler")

Magic Mirror

A liquid biocybernetic supercomputing medium of almost magical levels of complexity and flexibility, forms the basis of the datasphere; can also be used to reconstruct matter and energy from a pattern.

Puzzlebox

A transhuman megastructure comprising six vast themed habitats— the warps— as well as any connecting infrastructure or subordinate spaces; may all exist in the same universe or stretch across several.

Tasp

A device which stimulates a sentient (but not necessarily organic) being's pleasure center; available in a dizzying variety of forms on Puzzlebox, from small bliss-wands, to rifles and crowd-control devices, to sky-mounted bombing platforms.

Warp

Each of the six themed areas named for a species of quark; the six warps are not apparently physically contiguous with each other, and each may exist in its own pocket dimension.

See also: Archival Information