A few facts.
- A zombie has two parts. A living part and a dead part. The dead part is the human part, and the living, the parasitical.
- The human part needs to be dead for the parasitical part to assert itself, with few exceptions. Infection ensures a dead host in most cases.
- The parasitical part grows stronger with age. This is because the parasite digests the human, with preference to the nervous system.
- The more the parasite digests of the human, the more it must replace with its own material. Grey matter must be replaced sooner because it is eaten first. Similar ideas for the nerves, fibres, and so on. Pseudo-nerves, pseudo-neuronal cell bodies, pseudo-neural tracts, pseudo-glia, all of it similar in composition and organization but never the same, must assert itself to control the body, with finer and finer ability, greater strength, more acute senses, and increased intelligence.
- Eventually, other tissues are digested and must be replaced. I assume this would progress until the whole human body was gone, and all that was left was a humanoid parasite, walking and all.
A stray fact.
- There seems to be no purpose for the dead to eat the survivors. Experiments in which the dead were trapped in rooms for two years and given human food pieces ranging from daily suppers to no food at all, found no differences in the development of the dead. Eating would nourish the dead (human) part of the zombie, for which it is useless.
A few variants.
- Some parasites are able to assert themselves without the host human being dead. Nonetheless, development of the parasite and digestion of the host proceeds nearly the same: the nervous system is eaten while being replaced. For the host, speech is the first to go. Emotions are flattened. Basic motor functions and autonomic functions—things that allow the host to survive—remain intact until the end.
- Other parasites develop abnormally. Instead of the gradual process of digestion with replacement being mostly one-to-one, it's off-balanced: more is replaced than is digested, producing mutations and tumour-like growths.
Closing comments.
All of this indicates that a cure cannot be after-the-fact. There can be no such thing as "reviving" the dead. The only option is prevention.
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