Semantics of nanomachines

[Cogwerks]

All the diseases have an associated reagent. Exposure to a disease-causing reagent calls up a bunch of probabilities and crosschecks some other variables to see whether or not you get infected, it's not a 100% thing. Nanomachines cause robotic transformation, prions cause kuru, etc. So yeah, the reagent just calls the disease proc. Once you're infected, there's another set of probability checks and timers that ramp up the disease stages towards the terminal stage.