The Babel Virus

The Babel Virus is an alien virus that has the power to alter reality. In 2099 (N.F.Y. -3), it launched a probe that landed in the Pacific Ocean. That probe was picked up by a shipping vessel, which was then bought by a weapons-tech company. The weapons-tech company studied the probe and its effects on humans, even using the virus to shape unwilling subjects into twisted and deadly abominations. The Scrud was infected by the virus during one of her investigations, and she spread it to hundreds of millions of humans at her earliest opportunity. 
The Babel Virus isolates and occasionally traumatizes people - except in the case of entire communities that are infected by Babel. It also grants supernatural abilities, and can be extracted and exploited for paranormal purposes. 
The Babel Virus has a strong sense of self-preservation, and a symbiotic relationship with its victims. It has several main effects:

• Universal Awareness: When a person is first infected with the Babel virus, they are granted a vision of universal knowledge. This knowledge frequently concerns the state of the infectee's species in the universe at large, or the state of the universe itself.
• Altered Communication: A person can communicate freely with any other being who is also infected with the Babel virus, regardless of language, species, mode of communication, or other circumstantial difficulties. However, they cannot speak any languages that they were previously able to speak. Instead, their verbal speech comes out as a garbled collection of nonsense words to those without Babel.
• Time-Space Manipulation: Those infected with the Babel virus can sometimes develop supernatural abilities, such as the ability to accelerate their relationship with time, the ability to create force-fields, the ability to turn invisible, telekinesis, telepathy, and more.
• Loss of Species Identity: The Babel Virus seems designed to align its hosts with one another. Therefore, those infected by Babel stop seeing people who don't have Babel as kin unless the relationship is particularly close. Instead, Babel hosts see each other as members of the same extended family.
• Virus Vectoring: Babel spreads through sound. A person who hears and listens carefully to Babel will become affected by the virus, while those who try to stubbornly shut it out receive a sense of terror and foreboding and a massive headache. As a result, all Babel hosts are able to spread Babel, but doing so can be a very complicated affair.