That the Mind Plague was catastrophic, none can deny. That it threatened, briefly, to destroy much of Viridian culture is also indisputable. Only nostalgics and reactionaries, however, can honestly claim that exposure to the Ambivalence Drive was an unmitigated curse.

Fangalexia was introduced both too early and too late. Later, and the nascent Worldmind would have safely disassociated. Earlier, and disindividuation would not have even begun. As it was, the potent biochemical/nanomachine cocktail successfully limited temporal cognitive parallelism to near-immediacy, without returning psychic activity to baseline. The result was simultaneous stimulus overload (for the individuals) and starvation (for the nascent entity). This led in the fullness of time to the mayhem and hysteria common to such phenomena.

Once the nature of the flaw became known, producing Fangalextrin, a bundling of fine-tuned Fangalexia with off-the-shelf esper-suppression therapies, was fairly straightforward. It was thought that an twelve-week regime on the new therapy adhered to by even 40% of the afflicted should have been sufficient for a return to normalcy, and had the advances made in the research of the plague not so quickly led to the Nova projects, this would probably have been the case.

—Heichner Kzolknov