Possibly, but a lot of plants want to be eaten, for lack of a better phrase. Most fruiting plants reproduce by being eaten. You’re not killing a strawberry plant by eating the berry, you’re helping it

I thought the same, and I find it surprising that this thought wasn’t expressed. But then again, it might be that they are aware of it, and still find it immoral to consume something tied to being alive, because of some misguided implicit imperative. There’s only so much innate behavior that you can encode in xNA, and the end result might be contradictory. Just like most people can rationally understand that farming animals is morally questionable, and still eat meat because…they think they really have to. They accept the cognitive dissonance. We all have our own dissonances.

Wildly speculative (my headcanon untill proven wrong, which will happen): The virus was created from a species much like ours, in an attempt to put an end to wars and communication barriers. The broad strokes that the design of the virus allowed in controlling these emerging behaviors made it so that, by erring on the side of EXTREME life preservation instinct, it made it to be not self sustainable. It’s a mistake. But couple that to the other imperative, spreading and replication, and you have a suicidal hyve mind. It’s not that different from extremely aggressive viruses like Ebola. They come in waves because they can’t really become endemic, given that the extreme mortality coupled with the extreme transmissibility burn through the population very fast. It would be an evolutionary advantage for the virus to have mild symptoms and move around with minor consequences, but evolution is not a great optimizer, not on the short term at least, and not when population spikes and ebbs fast. And when something is artificial, it might benefit even less from this long term optimization. So what would this dying population do, faced with imminent death, and an imperative to propagate? Propagate the virus. Turn the entire planetary efforts to broadcasting the virus, as a last ditch effort to try again elsewhere. Perhaps we received the 4th, 5th, or the 960323th rebroadcasting, each intelligent species succumbing to it, and passing it forward. And who knows, it might be that on some species it works different, or it doesn’t work in everybody (hint, hint) and that leads to a different approach to solving the self-annihilation-by-starvation catch.