Doom Parrot

In 2001, the mathematician Vernon Berryman and an unfortunate assistant published “On Thinkable Forms, with notes towards a Logical Imaging Technique” in Nature. The paper indicated that some images could not be safely viewed by human beings because the brain, incapable of dealing with the image, would destroy its own capacity to reason:

[Berryman] imagined the human mind as a formal, deterministic computational system — a system that, as predicted by a variant of Gödel’s Theorem in mathematics, can be crashed by thoughts which the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking. The Logical Imaging Technique presents such a thought in purely visual form as a basilisk image which our optic nerves can’t help but accept. The result is disastrous, like a software stealth-virus smuggled into the brain.

Methods of creating these images, called BLITs after Berryman Lawrence Imaging Technique, were hinted at in the Nature paper and in a popular science article printed in New Scientist.

Berryman was working on constructing basilisk images at the Cambridge IV supercomputer facility when some kind of accident occurred. It is believed that Berryman and everyone else in the laboratory perished but all descriptions of the event have been suppressed by security agencies. Subsequent BLIT investigations at Lawrence Livermore and MIT (which resulted in the B-3 horror) were halted and personnel connected with these studies are not available for questioning.

There are persistent rumors that several basilisk images, the Cambridge IV ”parrot” and others hidden within the widely distributed Fractal Star, have found their way into the hands of hackers and taggers. Areas of London were shut down recently, reportedly because basilisks had been delay-tagged on walls in the area. The Albion Action group has claimed responsibility. And Parrots have been sent as attachments to ordinary-looking spam.

Following the break is an image purporting to be derived from the original parrot. It does not destroy rational thinking immediately after viewing but lies dormant until triggered by other images perceived by the brain.

THIS IMAGE IS INCLUDED FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. DO NOT VIEW WITHOUT CLEARANCE FROM YOUR PSYCH MONITOR.

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