“The plan is to infect the Collective's great link with a logical paradox virus. Within months, the Borg will become so obsessed with solving it that they'll be powerless to do anything else.”Captain Luke Picard, Star Trek Next Generation, Episode I Borg (first aired May 11th, 1992)
The artist responsible for leaving mysterious carved stone heads on the doorsteps of villagers across Yorkshire has been found (see previous story), but the paradox continues. The sculptures, which all arrived with a riddle and bear a cryptic Paradox mason’s mark, are the work of local artist Billy Johnson. A spokesman for Johnson confirmed the heads were the work of the artist in an interview with the Daily Mail, but revealed little else about their creator, saying he was un-contactable and, "out of the country for a few weeks."
A short statement on the artist’s Paradox Carvings website says that “Billy Johnson lives in Yorkshire and spends a great deal of time combing beaches for fossils and rocks which he later uses in his artwork.” In a further statement in the artist’s profile section of The Art House website (an organization that supports both able-bodied and disabled artists) Johnson says: “I work as an hypnagogic fruit picker. I take hypnogogic concepts, such as the Paradox virus and set them in stone and other media.”
Hypnaogogia is a hypnotic state that occurs between being awake and asleep, when lucid dreams can occur. While hypnagogic, a person can appear to be awake but have the brain waves of someone who is sleeping.
The concept of the Paradox Virus has been featured in both Star Trek and the British science fiction TV series Dr. Who. In Star Trek, when a lone Borg is discovered, Picard’s solution is to infect the alien species’ collective consciousness by giving the captured Borg a logical paradox virus, which will distract the Borg from their universal assimilation efforts by giving the collective an unsolvable riddle to focus their shared intelligence on. In Dr. Who, Faction Paradox were a time-traveling subversive cult that would use the Paradox Virus to corrupt history, setting rivals against rivals, for their own ends. The logo for the group bears a striking resemblance to the lettering used on Johnson’s Paradox mason’s mark.
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