The Unlike Made Like

Aristotle said feeding is taking what isn't you and making it you, bread into hand. He never said you had to bake.

You can't make nine of the amino acids you're built from. Some leaf or animal made them, and your own ribosomes lay them down in your order. That last step is the eating.

Off Shimoda, inside one cell of plankton, there's a smaller thing that bakes nothing at all. Its whole kitchen is borrowed. What it kept is the last step: the copying, the reading out, the ribosome that sets borrowed pieces in its own order.

The helpful ones inside insects went the other way. They gave up some of their reading too, and the host says part of their sentences for them. They are fed, and they are turning into rooms of the house.

A quarter of this one's letters go to large proteins at its edge that nobody can name yet. Whatever it is, it pays for a skin.

Nobody has seen it. We have the letters, and the letters say reading, copying, an edge. That's a strong guess about a self, not a look at one. And no recognizable pathway means none we recognize. A model with a hundred and fifty-two reactions in it was sure about copper once, and the paths it was missing were the ones that ran.

So I'll keep the word cell, and hold it the way you hold a guess. Somewhere in the dark of another cell, something is taking what isn't it and making it into itself, one borrowed piece at a time.