After further consultation, the neurologist proposed the illness might be caused by a slow acting sleeping-sickness-like pathogen, caught from Dizzard’s belongings—perhaps hitherto unknown, like Legionnaire’s Disease. Two weeks later, Dizzard’s and his student’s offices were quarantined. After two months with no further cases and cultures yielding only false alarms, quarantine was lifted.
When it was discovered janitors had thrown out some of Dizzard’s records, a research fellow and two more of Dizzard’s students decided to review his project files. On their third day, the students noticed that the research fellow had fallen into an unresponsive trancelike state and did not respond even to pinching. After the students failed to awaken the research fellow, they called an ambulance. The new patient showed the same symptoms as the previous case. Five days later, the city public health board imposed a quarantine on all building areas involved in Dizzard’s project.
The following morning, all members of the Autotomy Group refused to enter the research building. Later that day, occupants of the rest of the Autotomy Group’s floor, and then all 500 other workers in the building, discovered the Autotomy Project’s problems and left the building. The next day, the local newspaper published a story with the headline “Computer Plague.” In an interview, a leading dermatologist proposed that a virus or bacterium like computer lice had evolved that metabolized newly developed materials associated with computers, probably silicon. Others conjectured that the Autotomy Project’s large computers might be emitting some peculiar radiation. The director of the Autotomy Group was quoted: The illnesses were a public health matter, not a concern of cognitive scientists.
The town mayor then charged that a secret Army project involving recombinant DNA was in progress at the building and had caused the outbreak. Truthful denials of the mayor’s claim were met with understandable mistrust. The city council demanded immediate quarantine of the entire ten-story building and surrounding area. The university administration felt this would be an impediment to progress, but the local Congressional delegation’s pressure accomplished this a week later. Since building maintenance and security personnel would no longer even approach the area, special police were needed to stop petty vandalism by Juveniles. A Disease Control Center team began toxicological assays, protected by biohazard suits whenever they entered the quarantine zone. In the course of a month they found nothing, and none of them fell ill. At the time some suggested that, because no organic disease had been discovered in the three victims, and the two survivors showed some physiological signs associated with deep meditation states, the cases might be an outbreak of mass hysteria.
Meanwhile, the Autotomy Group moved into a “temporary” World War II-era wooden building. While loss of more than ten million dollars in computers was grave, the group recognized that the information, not the physical artifacts that embodied it, was indispensable. They devised a plan: biohazard-suited workers fed “hot” tapes to readers in the quarantine zone; the information was transmitted by telephone link from the zone to the new Autotomy Project site and recorded again. While transcription of the tapes allowed the project to survive, only the most important materials could be so reconstructed. Dizzard’s project was not in the priority class; however, we suspect an accident occurred.
A team of programmers was playing back new tapes, checking them on monitors, and provisionally indexing and filing their contents. A new programmer encountered unfamiliar material and asked a passing project supervisor whether it should be discarded. The programmer later reported the supervisor typed in commands to display the file on the monitor; as the programmer and the supervisor watched the lines advance across the screen, the supervisor remarked that the material did not look important. Prudence prevents our quoting his comments further. He then stopped speaking in midsentence. The programmer looked up; he found the supervisor staring ahead. The supervisor did not respond to questions. When the programmer pushed back his chair to run, it bumped the supervisor and he fell to the floor. He was hospitalized with the same symptoms as the earlier cases.
The epidemiology team, and many others, now proposed that the cause of illness in the four cases might not be a physical agent such as a virus or toxin, but rather an abstract piece of information—which could be stored on tape, transmitted over a telephone line, displayed on a screen, and so forth. This supposed information now became known as “the Riddle,” and the illness as “the Riddle coma.” All evidence was consistent with the once-bizarre hypothesis that any human who encountered this information lapsed into an apparently irreversible coma. Some also recognized that the question of exactly what this information is was extremely delicate.
This became clear when the programmer involved in the fourth case was interviewed. The programmer’s survival suggested the Riddle must be understood to induce coma. He reported he had read at least some lines on the monitor at the time the supervisor was stricken. However, he knew nothing about Dizzard’s project, and he was able to recall little about the display. A proposal that the programmer be hypnotized to improve his recall was shelved. The programmer agreed it would be best if he did not try to remember any more of what he had read, although of course it would be difficult to try not to remember something. Indeed, the programmer eventually was advised to abandon his career and learn as little more computer science as possible. Thus the ethical issue emerged of whether even legally responsible volunteers should be permitted to see the Riddle.
The outbreak of a Riddle coma epidemic in connection with a computer-assisted theorem-proving project could be explained; if someone discovered the Riddle in his head, he should lapse into coma before he could communicate it to anyone. The question arose of whether the Riddle had in fact been discovered earlier by hand and then immediately lost. A literature search would have been of limited value, so a biographical survey was undertaken of logicians, philosophers, and mathematicians working since the rise of modern logic. It has been hampered by precautions to protect the researchers from exposure to the Riddle. At present, at least ten suspect cases have been discovered, the earliest almost 100 years ago.
Psycholinguists began a project to determine whether Riddle coma susceptibility was species-specific to humans. “Wittgenstein,” a chimpanzee trained in sign language who had solved first-year college logic puzzles, was the most appropriate subject to see the Autotomy Project tapes. The Wittgenstein Project investigators refused to cooperate, on ethical grounds, and kidnapped and hid the chimpanzee; the FBI eventually found him. He was shown Autotomy tapes twenty-four hours a day, with no effect whatever. There have been similar results for dogs and pigeons. Nor has any computer ever been damaged by the Riddle.
In all studies, it has been necessary to show the complete Autotomy tapes. No safe strategy has been found for determining even which portion of the tapes contains the Riddle. During the Wittgenstein-Autotomy Project, a worker in an unrelated program seems to have been stricken with Riddle coma when some Autotomy tapes were printed out accidentally at a public user area of the computer facility; a month’s printouts had to be retrieved and destroyed.