Cerebral Scourge

Survivors describe the early stages of Cerebral Scourge the same way, almost without variation: "It feels like your mind is slipping through your own fingers." A forgotten name here. A word that should be on the tip of the tongue but is not. The sense that something important was just thought and is now simply gone, like water through a cracked bowl. By the time anyone realizes this is not ordinary fatigue, the disease has already begun consuming what it came for.
  Cerebral Scourge is a neurological decay disease transmitted through psionic resonance. Specific Zombies and Raiders carrying an active psychic contagion act as origin points, releasing area-wide psionic pulses that charge nearby Aberrants as temporary carriers. Those Aberrants then become capable of inflicting the disease once before their psychic charge fades, creating a chain of transmission that can sweep through a group before anyone understands what hit them. The Infection, once triggered by the resonance, begins feeding on the electrical activity of the brain itself, consuming memories as an energy source. Neural tissue breaks down. Thoughts dissolve. The mind empties.
  The progression is measured in losses. First, simple words go missing from conversation. Then familiar faces stop connecting to names. Skills that took years to learn become inaccessible as the afflicted loses their highest levels of training. A shimmering pattern appears under the skin along the scalp and temples, the visible signature of the Infection interacting with what remains of the neural signals. Mid-stage cases display slurred speech, emotional instability, nosebleeds, and involuntary twitching. The personality flattens into confusion and panic as the host realizes, in the moments of clarity that grow rarer each day, that they are disappearing from the inside out. Advanced cases lose everything: the ability to communicate, to recognize others, to retain any sense of who they once were. The brain shrinks and darkens. The body remains alive but unresponsive, a hollow shell guided by nothing but faint Infection impulses.
  Treatment exists, but there is no quick fix. Sustained memory exercises over multiple months can arrest Stage 1. Deeper stages require escalating intervention up to biokinetic memory resets. Those who survive early treatment may regain partial memory, but the gaps never fully close. Fragments of who they were remain scattered and unreachable, permanent reminders of what Cerebral Scourge took before it was stopped. Those who reach Stage 5 die as their brain ceases to function entirely. The Mortis returns them alive and free of the disease, but large portions of their memory are gone forever.