Codex of the Synapse: Folio B3.3

Pattern Language Amulets

"On that very day, after I witnessed the O'Connell family's hollow feast, prepared - with a terrible fatalistic merriment - from next year's seed potatos, I set out for America, at last grimly confident in the irrevocablity of Ireland's fate."

John Kerrigan, Remembering Black 47

"Tumbled from the ladder to Heaven, stripped of every last word of divine knowledge, blinded and abandoned by a chiding G-d, the The Besht tried to rescue a single phrase, any single thing, out of the amnesia in which the Lord had shrouded his studies. After a long silence, and at first with great difficulty, but soon with frenzied bliss, he recited the letters 'Aleph, Beth, Gimmel, Daleth,....' His knowledge rekindled from these few embers, The Besht began his climb once again."

attrib. Rebbe Elimelekh of Lisensk, oral tradition

The Keepers paid ritual attention to the periodic capture of small fragments, or phrases, of incoming pattern language emissions from the Synapse. Pattern language entering the local-world usually translates immediately into images native to that world. In the amulets, however, the process is frozen, and a phrase of "pure" unreclaimed pattern is captured before forming images. Preserved in small amulets, these arrested fragments of pure pattern were often kept in ornate reliquaries or mounted on the frames of portals of all kinds: doors, windows, telescopes, mirrors, and toilets (not unlike the mezuzahs of the Jews, who consider their own language's pattern, more than its content, to be an expression of the Divine).

The Keepers created these amulets to prepare for the Synaptic Apocalypse, or Uncreation, in which the Cycle of Pattern Language Reclamation ceases, leading to the unravelling of the Continuum. By preserving strands of Pattern Language it was believed that the Pattern Language could be re-seeded from samples, like preserving a teaspoon of yogurt from one batch in order to culture the next. In the event of an Uncreation event, these containers, normally the holiest possession the Keepers, are disassembled, smashed, or otherwise emptied to release the Pattern Language trapped inside, which then replicates to begin the Cycle anew.