Kept

Off Shimoda, inside one drifting cell of plankton, they found a smaller thing that has given nearly all of it away.

No way to make the food it lives on. A hundred and eighty-nine proteins, fewer than some viruses carry.

What it kept is the reading: the ribosome, the copying, the part that takes its own instruction and says it.

They took it for a fault in the software. Too small to be real. They ran it again, another way, and it came back round, unbroken.

Nobody has seen it. A name, a sequence, a circle of letters filed in three databanks. It eats from someone else's kitchen

and still does its own saying. That is where they drew the line between a cell and the other thing. It stands on it.