Well, not exactly, we manage to slow down the degeneration but the human body seems incompatible.

To explain degeneracy, one must understand the nature of these extraterrestrials. What the station doctor, director Staokin discovered late.

Staokin is with Zero, the other Mars One member immune to the substance, but it's not viral, it's bacterial. Black torrent is a multinuclear unicellular plasmodium.

This plasmodium would have appeared in another universe billions of years ago. At the end of its universe, it would have arrived in ours by meteorites having borrowed a wormhole. It would have infected many living forms.