The Synthæse, or Children of the Woods, were a prehistoric proto-civilisation of woodland sprites and hippies; a kind of peaceable pre-derivative, banking people, largely unconcerned with material wealth but blessed with a preternatural gift for option pricing. They roamed the moors and fens of England semi-naked in the time before the alliance of men and elves, eschewing all earthly rancour, regarding physical settlement of disputes as sinful and instead voluntarily exchanging their differences in a standardised, non-physical, “synthetic” terms[1] across a centralised marketplace.
Alas, they modeled their delta by using profoundly flawed value-at-risk techniques and wildly miscalculated their exposure to the First Men, a marauding race of mercenary derivativessalesmen from the ancient doomed city of Salomoné, who it is said, wiped them out in the late 1980s in one big bang, but not before they left behind traces of their enlightened methods of exchange which the First Men hungrily adopted when, in the fires of the Iron Mountain, they forged the One Agreement out of the remnants of the 1985 ISDA Code and an old LMA template and the Cross Default clause, which still afflicts the ISDA Master Agreement to this day.
↑The Greek word συντίθημι, from which is the root of the name Synthæse, means “to bring together in one place” (from συν- (“together”) + τίθημι (“set, place”)).
