An engineered virus that mimics the symptoms of the neural communicative disruption of its namesake dysfunction breaks into an epidemic on DS9 from a long-dormant VIRAL DEVICE left in a replicator's MATERIALIZATION SUBROUTINE, designed by B An engineered virus that mimics the symptoms of the neural communicative disruption of its namesake dysfunction breaks into an epidemic on Deep Space Nine from a long-dormant Viral Device left in a replicator's Materialization Subroutine, designed by Bajoran resistance scientist Dekon Elig as never-used anti-Cardassian sabotage 18 years earlier. In later stages the virus attacks the autonomic nervous system with a high fever and resists standard treatment; without relief, death is expected in 12 hours.The virus, somewhat resembling a skein of yarn with a restricted middle binding when magnified, imposes itself within a patient's established synaptic pathways in the temporal lobe and then randomly reroutes them, disrupting the process between the stimuli and its descriptive word in memory.Escaping Biofilter detection due to its uniqueness as a synthetic, it spread via replicated food into the bloodstream and quickly mutated into an airborne variety, spreading even faster though with a varying incubation rate; it never affected Quark or Constable Odo, perhaps based on their racial types. Despite the Cardassian design of the device it is traced to, Doctor Bashir finds the virus's unique Protein Sequence and lack of Mono-Clonial DNA with a too-perfect Nucleotide Sequence is instead of Bajoran origin.