soma.eml

soma.eml
Source:	loc
Date:	0000/07/15
Area:	B3

soma.eml is a text document stored in terminal B03 Extra in B3.

From: Sun Wei-Yang
To: Arkady Chernyshevsky
Subject: Names

Names are a funny thing. I remember how much we struggled to come up with a name for our project.

All serious scientists name their projects by just translating them to Greek or Latin, right? "Corpus" made me think of some horrible disease, so we used the Greek word instead. Soma. Quite appropriate!

But then, since we needed corporate funding, we had to come up with a backronym. Corporations love backronyms, you know? They even sent us a list of buzzword-heavy suggestions to help us get started. Stuff like:

Self-sufficient Orthostatic Modular Android

Sustainable Observant Mechanized Anthropoid

Skeuomorphic Omniadaptable Mobile Anthropomaton

&/() After a while, we got so frustrated that we started getting silly.

Sabertoothed Overexcited Murder Android

Sentient Orthopaedic Monkey Automaton

Strange Olga's Menacing Assassobot

Superb Octopod Marinades Apelings

Satisfying Overcooked Mint Alligator

Stinky Ornithological Mule Allocator

Skroink Oof Minky Ack

Stupid Obscure Meaningless Acronym

In the end we all ended up hating the name SOMA just because we had so many fights about it with the sponsors. So when Alexandra told that story about the Talos Principle, ()%§$/%5& caught on. I don't know whether it really fits, but I kind of like it.

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