Factions/Imperative

Okay, so, first the slow encasement in aerolattice, several coats. I'll be on a time dilator and some synaesthetics so it'll feel like I'm turning inorganic, and the world should right about that time start going crazy-quilt. I've already got the music picked; I picked up a recording from the Forge last week, lots of heavy overbass and throbbing. Then, right about the time the fifth coat hardens, start raining down the hammers. From invincible steel to fragile glass, and the paranoia should start kicking in right after the first hit. Trust me, this is going to feel so flash.

The Imperative

BottomWarp's single biggest contribution to media expression has to be the Imperative, a stimulation simulation—stimsim or stimmie for short—design and replay scene. The Imperative's whole raison d'etre is the creation, accumulation and replay of experiences recorded via sense-rig, braintape and other means, in order to feel everything that could ever be felt, see everything that could be seen, and at least virtually do everything that could be done.

History

The original Imperative themselves were a small but diverse cluster of artists who decided to find out just how far the body could be pushed, and began putting themselves through all manner of sensory experience just to find out what it was like. For posterity's sake, they began making stimmies of their experiences, and then they discovered that copies of their recorded experiences were being broadcast at braindance clubs as an exercise in consentual gestaltism and mass-hallucination. Even the Mind Electric has started to offer stratchy, badly-generated dupes of their experiences to shock the locals of DownWarp. Thus was the Imperative formally born.

Membership

The vast bulk of people calling themselves Imperatives are actually just sinks, replay-fans and fanatics who maintain vast personal libraries of virtual sensation and eagerly swap and exchange recorded sensations on the datalinks, watching the datalinks hungrily for any new creation from their favorite recorders. Scattered among these hangers-on are the core "scene", as it were: the ones who actually create new experiences, seeking the newest and furthest limits of personal and group experience to record and submit to the datalinks for others to enjoy.

Philosophy

No act is forbidden to the proper Imperative, because everything is meant to be experienced. Life is nothing but one giant experience broken into small, sometimes-processable fragments, and as such it is the drive of any Imperative to push zirself to the limits and take down every moment for the record. Remember, it isn't just about doing it. It's about sharing it with others.

It's very common for Imperatives to specialize in some category or class of sensation, or some theme around which all of their stimmies will focus. Transformation, sex, hallucinations, waking dreams, nightmares, or some other act or idea that drives their work. Often, a dedicated fan will be able to determine which recorder actually made any given stimmie simply by the sensations and actions that are embedded within, as a music aficionado can learn to spot composers by commonalities in their instrumentation and arrangement.

Art

Exactly what is conveyed in any given recording is a matter of personal taste on the part of both recorder and perceiver. Senses can often be turned on and off like channels or instruments, and some stimmies have been known to come with a recorder's-thoughts channel detailing the ideas that went into the act as it's happening. However, these are not always guaranteed, and some recorders are known for heavy psychotropic filters that prevent any of the emotional states of the recorder to come through in the stimmie, leaving the sensory channels completely intact, the emotional response an exercise for the perceiver.

Recently, within the Imperative there has come a new subgroup, the Remixers, who have gained notoriety for taking pre-recorded stimmies and interleaving them, creating wholly virtual experiences, collages of sensation, that never actually happened but nonetheless create powerful new messages on their own, a true synthesis of their original derivatives. Some within the Imperative say that these "unreal" experiences are rubbish, invalid as experience because they never actually happened. Others, however, contend that these virtual braintapes are just as legitimate as their original counterparts, because they're all virtual to anyone except the original recorder.

Most dedicated Imperatives lack any real sense of the long-term, simply because of the focus on sensation and the now of the experience. Once the scene is over, the scene is over, and—no hard feelings—it's so so ten minutes ago. The hard-core Imperative isn't afraid of having wild, passionate sex one night with someone, then wake up the next morning, kiss zim on the lips, thank zim for the good time, and then leave without a second thought. It isn't that they don't build friendships, but that they don't build any sort of monogamous or "faithful" relationships; that kind of same-ol'-same-ol' would simply get boring after a very short while.

Fashion

Every Imperative, bar none, has at least some form of engram-playback engine, either some form of cybernetic jack to an external rig or a wetware, biotech implant integrated directly into the nervous system. Most go with the simpler rig, but the truly dedicated usually swear that the resulting experiences are just that much more real on "native organic". Beyond that universal trait, appearance is entirely a matter of personal taste or the dictates of a scene, and an Imperative will change bodies as often as some people change socks if the scene calls for it.