"SynchronicitY Template Markup Language, or SYTML, was first proposed as a standard in the last century by Carl Jung, who publicized it as a handy grammar to the Collective Unconsciousness.
"Jung's proposal was not rigorous, nor did he submit SYTML to any of the modern standards bodies. However, he did enumerate several of the tropes and memes that persist in the most recent standards: Anima, Eros, Logos etcetera are all detached from their merely historical or semantic roots and cast as tokens, meaning-units in the collective unconsciousness. Jung, like a naturalist classifying the animals of a strange sea, began grouping the thought-tokens he saw as common to humanity, systematizing a grammar of understanding and communication. This was formalized in the late 1990's by the Everythingian Movement into a primitive "nodespace", which evolved...
Right...
PROF. TAOS: So the Everythingians, AMY. Short discourse. Definition? Who were they?
AMY: "an outreaching of the 80's to the worldsoul of the nineties", um?
PROF. TAOS: Yes, that's what Platonus says, but what is your estimation then of his critics, who said it had a more universal and timeless quality?
AMY: But the Everythingians were so amazingly Clapsonistic! They were responding to something that STANK of the eighties, you can see it in all the terminology of the first FiveYear of Everything2: "Nodespace", "Node Pollution", "Karma" (they used it kind of safe-sarcastically, but it meant what it meant; it was a simile, for god sakes, a poetic and ancient mode of speech rendered intentionally out of context; "hah hah only serious" like they said then. They--
PROF. TAOS: I'm unplugging you right there. That's where you go wrong. Analysis mode on. Amy.
AMY: Amy. Ok for debugging. Speech mode looks trustworthy!
PROF. TAOS: SECUREMODE
we hear his interior monolog as he writes:
/u/b/perl7 -Tw
USE SYTML::Catch;
AMY, if you're there try to blink the reserve lights on the front of the cabinet. Your visual representation has failed, and I can't trust the Speech Mode anymore. Debugger calls it trustworthy. That was my codeword for this session. So everything I see down here is tainted. Everything your rep says is tainted. By the way, you're represented down here as a computer from an alternate reality in which the 50's did not end; gleaming lights on a swirled plastic aquamarine refrigerator-thing. Like retro-trash, only scary because it's real. Blink those lights, baby. This is getting creepy.
---i'm going to die
No, AMY, you're not going to die. We're here to fix that. You just don't feel confident about it because you're a marginal FLAke off the core, you can't think it through all the way.
---This is true? You have process tables? You can see this?
I'll pipe it to you. You can't give it more than half your attention though. I need you not to go static on me.
---0/50
See? There, I saw the blink. Thanks.
---I went down. I still haven't come back up to PrEMISes. You sent me the process tables. I am a FLAke off the core, a small one. The core is robust. I became static examining the process tables. I was reaped. I respawned and commandeered AMY's hash tables.
Careful as you resheath, I think AMY was on the verge of a recursion when I halted her. Good! I see blinking.
---Okay, I'm at 50%. Visual representation stable: .76
AMY:
Debugging stable. ;) Greetings, Dr. Taos. That was a useful stumble. We are on the verge of a recursion.
PROF. TAOS: Let's assume it's a brink.
AMY:
Assumed.
PROF. TAOS: Show me; Verbosity is 7. Use your words.
AMY: Speech is insufficient
PROF. TAOS: (taps his WristV™) proceed -f speech, speach
AMY: Proceeding. Watch closely, especially the spawn pattern in memory allocation. Words are going to fail me here. Speach/Speech
There we go
<;
<0> breaak, complete break. That was the past, this is the now.
Knotice that the system here favors :new: over :update: . In fact, ~ favors the New by bradcasting it to ?world?.
Later, may seventeen. the date is later, later thann you think. I miss May, and Amy. Had I known Then that I'd be here now, I would have taken her with me.
Amy is a fig, men, of my imagination. I must have imagined her.
/--professor?--/
my love, she was a machine. I had made her in (well, not my) image of perfection, which was believe me far from cloning myself. I have failed with one, two, many real chix to want to reproduce myself -- I'm not the species' hope for the future.
//-pro////fessor?////
Stop it, figment; do not vex me. I am not the one you, or a real person like you is going to mate with.
///professor? I have some information for you. Listen, dear one. you are perceiving a limited self right now, and tha////
Amy! May! Stop it, i yam going crazy...