Quote"(It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another -- the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.)

QuoteAs far as scientists can tell from its genome -- the only evidence of its existence so far -- it's a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum's mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli.

https://www.science.org/content/article/microbe-bizarrely-tiny-genome-may-be-evolving-virus