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.