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"I'm not familiar with your field, but that seems like an incredibly difficult flex to pull off. The eye spots, I mean." said Dr. Calvini, "I have a hard enough time taking care of one species, your virus worked across dozens."

Buster's eyes lit up and he shifted forward in his chair a little, in spite of everything he still loved the science. "Yeah that's why we, they, started relying on them. When your civilization is composed of all these different species, using targeted pathogens during wartime makes a lot more sense because you can be a lot more precise. If you have a bunker full of soldiers and their leader is a goat and there are no other capricus stationed there? You can drop a modified hyper-paratuberculosis on them, wait a day for it to clear out, and then if they don't surrender you target the next-highest person. Or if fighting gets lethal enough during a civil war and the leader of the insurgency is an armadillo, you cropdust the entire place in turbo-leprosy and decapitate the entire movement."

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"I see the logic, even if it is monstrous." said Dr. Calvini, "Us all being the same species didn't do much to help unite us politically when we had our homeworld, but at least sometimes we agreed that biological weapons were to be frowned upon. If only because they had a way of getting out of control and killing the people who organized the wars, not just the ones who fought in them."

"If only the Nakunan Empire were so lucky. But yeah, it is very hard to design something that can kill across all 48 species that were stationed at Martenwol. That's why I had a job, Telomerics is the specialization of wrapping lab-made pathogens in different amino acid sheathes to effect their transmission vectors. Usually that's focused on making things less contagious for targeted use, but I've definitely worked on a few City Erasers in my time."

"I have to ask, have you ever made a virus that can kill just one person?" asked Dr. Calvini.

"Nope. That might technically be possible at some point, though, and there's a lot of research into it. Right now you can make a virus that will kill foxes, you can make a virus that will specific types of foxes, but you can't make a virus that will make a specific fox die."