“I think I may have found the pathogen. It’s small. It looks a little like a prion, maybe. Like a strangely folded protein, maybe, but only in its shape. It’s much smaller than our proteins. And it reproduces faster than prions. In some ways it’s like the viris that live inside viruses, or the v’s, but smaller. Some seem to be nested in each other. The smallest is ten nanometers long, the largest fifty nanometers. I’m sending up the electron microscope images. Hard to say if they’re alive. Maybe some interim step toward life, with some of the functions of life, but not all. Anyway, in a good
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