Oblin-1
File sealed
The detectives are still writing this one up. The poster and the facts are below; the film and the interrogation room open soon.
Booking photographs


The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, ruled every 0.2 nm. Ten thousand end to end would span a human hair. Mugshot: its discoverers’ AlphaFold model.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Oblin-1. Old case files: COR_alpha_ORF-1.
- Height
- 8.4 nm, standing on end. Allegedly.
- Weight
- 39 zeptograms, on paper.
- Build
- Two helix bundles in a beta-sheet clasp. The last helix won’t sit still.
- Marks
- Its most conserved part is the one bit the computer couldn’t fold.
- Habits
- Its gene zips itself into a hairpin, half the obelisk.
- Associates
- Kin in half the mouths sampled, and in every ocean.
- Last seen
- As a gene, in human gut RNA. In person: never.
of them have ever been isolated or imaged. The mugshot is a prediction.
You’ve never seen one. Neither has anyone else.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Oblin-1, No. 115 of the exotic forty. They were made for noticeboards around Boston, Cambridge and the rest of the east coast.
Found one? Scan its QR code with your phone. If you're a signed-in player, the sighting goes on your record with +1 XP.
Not a player yet? Join the Epic Quest: the real role-playing game of Molecular Reality, a nanopore lab, with the CEO as gamemaster.