the Mold Theory

The reader community's name for one of the main candidate answers to what broke Hal: that nobody dosed him — his own body synthesized DMZ endogenously, seeded by the basement mold he ate as a small child ("I ate this," scene 002, pp. 10-11). The textual hooks: DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, "an obscure mold that grows only on other molds" (p. 170); on a drug assay it reads as nothing but "a slight case of imbalanced yeast" (endnote 321, p. 1064); and no dose is ever shown on the page. The archive carries it as a live open reading — textually disciplined, though a minority position — graded in the What Happened to Hal adjudication.