There were reports that many senior citizens were deliberately seeking out opportunities to infect themselves with the contagion. This took place despite the solemn pronouncements from the medical community that the disease was of an unknown nature and outcome. There continues to be little hope of a cure being developed in the near future.

But the terminally old frequently feel they have nothing to lose. They are accustomed to having their bodies manipulated by vaguely malevolent forces over which they had little control. The infection seemed little worse than age or doctors.

Once introduced into the body of a new host, the contagion eventually enters the nucleus of virtually all somatic cells. The eventual results are astonishing and perplexing to modern science: the patient slowly and subtly begins to reverse the aging process. In the case of the elderly, the alterations are initially minute: often the disease is first discovered when a patient with multiple chronic conditions ceases to be ill. Disease resistance and rapid healing of injuries marks the early stage. Over the next few years, physical structure is rejuvenated, as if the infected individual is aging backwards. Appearance begins to change, skin regaining its elasticity, muscles and bones rebuilding their once-lost strength.

It must seem like a miracle for many of those with the contagion. Nonetheless, even early in the epidemic, researchers were quick to point out that represented an unknown and possibly dangerous new infection.

The mechanism of transmission is poorly understood. The spread of many diseases is facilitated in part through human behavior. For example, failing to wash your hands can place you at greater risk for colds and flu. Using condoms can decrease one's risk of sexually-transmitted diseases. However, the only similarities observed among those infected with the contagion have been 1) recent contact with another infected person, with no common form of interaction, and 2) recent experience of a powerful sense of shame. Most new cases have recently done something which they regretted, but others reported that they have felt long-standing shame over an event which took place months or years ago.

Patients find that their lives are profoundly altered by their infection. Many emerge from nursing facilities prepared to resume lives that they had considered lost to the deleterious effects of aging. Few have the necessary financial or social resources to do this. Their children, who had begun the psychological process of addressing the coming death of their parents, find themselves confused and uncertain what to do. Particularly poignant are cases in which one partner is infected while the other continues to age. Even long-standing marriages seldom survive the competing interests of the two individuals. The elderly partner cannot continue to meet the needs and participate in the activities of the infected person, who sees the disease as another chance to do all that was left undone in life.

Indeed, the breakup of such relationships often begins before the contagion has infected the new host. When researchers first made the link between the psychological experience of shame and the transmission of the disease, many elderly people began to seek contact with infected people, and to engage in behavior with them that was likely to produce sensations of embarrassment and humiliation. Practices that are widely viewed as extreme deviance and sociopathy became commonplace among those who wished to become infected. This alone caused irrevocable harm to some relationships.

What gradually became apparent is that many people will risk anything, and subject themselves to debasement that they could barely imagine, in order to taste the promise of life again. The slim hope of savoring the thin scents of youth moved people to destroy the vestiges of the life they had built, and desecrate others' memories of them. Elderly people lay themselves naked before the sickening, whirling penetrations of their most base desires, prostituting their bodies to the tyranny of life for life's sake.

Then, new and disturbing evidence from the first wave of the infected suggested that the reversed aging process did not remain constant over time -- it accelerated. Where the reverse-rate initially begins at a 1:1 ratio (i.e. each year of infection reverses the effects of age approximately one year), it increases 50% in each successive year.

For example, an individual infected at age 80 will resemble a 79 year old after one year. Following another year, they will appear to be approximately 77.5 years old. Additional years of infection will cause their bodies to regress to the state of a 75, 71, and 66 year old. By year 6, they will physically resemble a 60 year old. Two years later, the rate of regression is such that they will resemble someone of thirty years of age.

The first wave of those infected is now reaching this milestone. If the process continues, by the end of the following year they will physically resemble a 5 year old. A few weeks later, they will have regressed to infantile and then fetal form. What will then take place is unknown.

Already, those infected are discovering that the disease is no simple cure for the ravages of old age. Although the infection initially appears to make the individual age backwards, many patients find that they do not continue to resemble their younger bodies. Research reveals that their bodies are flooded with undifferentiated cells, of a type usually found only in fetuses. These cells, possessing the capacity to become any other cell in the body, begin to clump and form soft, fleshy protuberances, often around the chin and neck and at the base of the spine. Although they lumps seem to pose no threat to the patient, many individuals find that their recaptured beauty is seriously compromised by this transformation. Most have begun a regular cycle of cosmetic surgery to remove the recurrent growths.

Scientists note that when removed, the undifferentiated cells that comprise the tissues take an unusually long time to die. Some researchers now believe that they presage the end stage of the disease, and that the patients themselves will eventually sink into a bloating hedge of soft, warm flesh. They will be erased, the specificity of their various body tissues vanishing in a haze of fetal zen. The more radical researchers say that the real contagion is what will then grow from the empty vessel of potential that remains: the organism that is progressively unwinding the human story and preparing to write its own tale in our blank pages.