Beauty, pleasure, happiness, extasy. Desire, freedom, choice, empowerment. The terms and notions that shape our lives, yet are taken for granted. Though they'd lived in the Mess for generations, most of its denizens still took these as favors, rather than rights, some even as privileges. Though the Warps as we know them today had not yet formed, the populous were already divided into three groups; the pursuers of happiness, those who wanted nothing else but for themselves and more importantly others, to be happy. The pursuers of freedom, of goals, those who thought the Mess' greatest gift was the choice it gave to everyone to do as they wanted. They were traditional in their ways and sought knowledge through the achieved semi-immortality, yet still aligned themselves according to an internal hierarchy. The third were simply neutrals, those who wanted to live in peace and follow the moment. Though by far the largest of the groups, their lack of a common goal made them insignificant in actual conflicts.
For the longest of times the groups coexisted in relative calm. The balance shifted from one side to the other, but for the most part remained constant. That is, until the Function came along. No one really knows who or why created the Functions, or is at least not saying, but just like Puzzlebox itself, they too were different back then. Unchecked and more involved, they were the prototypes and perhaps mere shadows of what we identify as a Function today.
Two of those got increasingly interested and eventually took sides in the ideology conflict, much to the dismay of the masses that simply wanted the groups to merge and calm down. The art wars, innocent sector crowding and vocal mantra shouters of the old were suddenly just a happy memory; followers of either side, convinced further of their right by having something as powerful as a function agree with them because increasingly radical, the common points between the two slowly fading until all but the most extreme-pushed ideas remained. Reminiscent of old religions, the followers began altering their biologies to fit their views and increasingly, the views of the protofunctions above them.
Those who believed in beauty became almost caricatures, plastic forms of perfect proportions, equipped with subsonic projectors that overwrote the subconscious controls of those around them, filling them with desire, lust, sensuality. Thousands starved to death, were brought back from backup only to starve again as they concentrated only on carnal desires, painting, laser and holographic projections, anything their altered state told them was their purpose to perfect.
The other group turned increasingly militant. Honor and tradition became servility and status, choice a word, the ability to instantiate power. The other side gaining in preprogrammed size each day, the function in control decided to fight fire with fire. Its troops were infected with a nanovirus that took control of those around, yet something was wrong... the conflict had caused original purposes to blur, but not disappear. Though the infection made its victims despise beauty, it did so by reshaping its definition. The 'troops' were walking abstractions, some horrible and flayed, yet with most perfect, child-like faces and soft singing voices, others almost a direct copy of the other wide, but twisted, missing, wounded.
Uninvolved protofunctions increasingly concerned with the situation, the other two wasted no time starting the conflict before they could be interfered with. Masses of shiny, sparkling, smooth, beautiful yet frightening denizens throwing big-bowed presents that played the slaving song clashed against the walking abominations with technological weapons that burned, severed, decapitated and most importantly, infected. Each side pushed on by their chosen god, each god expending Mess resources to help its side, the neutrals left in the middle long killed and brought back in safety zones.
Not much is known of what happened afterward. Some say the Mess itself simply reprogrammed all backup systems to restore individuals in states prior to the conflict, others that the protofunctions themselves did it, but in a day, the results and indeed most memories of the war were gone, along with the malfunctioning 'gods'. It was then than the idea of Warps was first considered, to create a buffer between the most radical of ideas and contain the potential extremists in environments of their choosing. The records of that time available to the public are sketchy at best, but some would hint that the two functions still exist, each contained in its own Warp, their reach limited by the Mess and its Functions.
This is the tale I was told and the tale I tell you. But of course, I could be wrong.