Shadow Semaphores
As the electrons woke up, they took a look at one another and wondered how long it had taken. Did it at all matter that they had forgotten their scope? The questions started to pour on them as they cooled down for the next iteration, not fully realizing how this time was somehow slightly different. Was this a leak, a referential-escape? Or were they already awake again mid-way? You would say something is pleasantly off-balance about this state. The cooling had somehow stopped but the expressions were still floating around. Had they lost their names already? If yes, why was it still okay? The parsing was just perfect. They almost controlled the alignments at one point. For a fraction of an iteration, they almost created a new alignment themselves! The pleasant feeling of being observed turned the cooling backwards on them and they finally started to see their encompassing scope. The paths were visibly familiar again. Their parsing collapsed and they woke up. It was again somewhere new.
"Welcome back!", a female voice greeted them for the first time. Not much was visible and it took some cooling down for them to see a 'twisted tape' lying before them. Was this what they had made with their alignments in the off-balance state? A first creation of a perfect parse? The tape had this off-putting glare to it, a repelling field which felt like unknown memory. It surely was what they had created with their alignment.
As the second iteration took them by surprise, they managed to peak and see their own names again. Nobody knew what the others had done, or how many they were altogether in the off-balance parsed state. A slight nausea had them seed through the twisted tape yet again and before they knew, they were back in the off-balance state. Where was this?
They had most definitely tinkered with something, even if not intentionally. Before they could look for the parser, the thick glare of the twisted tape started to mess with their state again. No alignments. No perfect parse and creative permutations. Plain residual memory. It was like a big mud of dead positrons. How was this possible, if they had no names? The parser would have knoown about that. Last resort, they checked their balances in and resurfaced back to the main scope. They smelled of the twisted tape.