Madness string 81588

Random mermaid
Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. Ultimately the determining feature is how well it's understood in practice, or in retrospect. If a thousand years later nobody still understands it and has made no progress toward understanding it, maybe it is magic... or maybe they're just idiots.
Then there's the question of what to do with your corpse. I mean, sure, burying it is the right thing to do. But the fucking virus can survive in a corpse for years. You could kill every rabid animal on the planet today, and if two years from now, some moist, preserved, rotten hunk of used-to-be brain gets eaten by an animal, it starts all over.