The nanoswarm kills a rabbit outside the complex, so Jack goes outside with Mae to inspect. The swarms wander around the plant during the day, but go elsewhere when strong winds blow or night falls. Jack learns Julia was helping to make the swarms more benign, but they regressed when she stopped coming to the facility. Most alarmingly, the swarm possesses rudimentary intelligence, the ability to quickly learn and innovate.
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The swarms exhibit predatory behavior, killing wild animals through the use of a code that Jack himself had worked on.
These "swarms" appear to be clouds of solar-powered self-sufficient nanobots, reproducing and evolving ( necroevolution) at rapid speeds. Ricky claims that contractors improperly installed filters in a vent, causing assemblers, bacteria, and nanobots to be blown into the desert, where they began forming into autonomous swarms.
Jack is taken to the Xymos research facility in Nevada's Basin Desert, where he is given a tour of the lab and introduced to the programming team (Mae, Charley, David, Rosie, Bobby, and Vince.) He is shown a machine used to make nanobot assemblers from bacteria, though Ricky refuses to share the source code for said nanobots. In an unexpected twist, she is injured in a car crash shortly after that, leaving Jack to consult for Xymos, as project manager Ricky is struggling with the nanobots. Julia begins to display abusive behavior toward her family, and is seen driving with an unidentifiable passenger. Soon after, the memory chips in Eric's MP3 player turn to dust. Next, Jack finds a strange device located underneath Amanda's bed. First, their son Eric claims to have seen "silver men" cleaning the house in the middle of the night.
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A bewildered Jack returns home to a strangely indifferent Julia.Ī series of strange events leads Jack to suspect that something unusual is occurring in his home. Jack takes her to the hospital, where an MRI mysteriously cures her instantly.
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Later that night, their baby Amanda wakes in agony, her skin turning bright red. Jack is impressed, but grows more suspicious as he notices the video was not filmed on the day she claimed it to be. One night, Julia shows Jack a video of Xymos nanobots being injected into a human test subject. Her intense focus on work creates distance between herself and her family, but Jack believes Julia may be having an affair. Julia claims to be working on revolutionary imaging technology, which takes up most of her time. His wife, Julia, serves as a high ranking executive for a Nanorobotics company called Xymos.
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The novel is narrated by protagonist Jack Forman, an unemployed software programmer taking the role of a house husband. ( April 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Fields such as population dynamics and host-parasite coevolution are also at the heart of the novel.įilm rights to the book were purchased by 20th Century Fox. The book features relatively new advances in the computing/scientific community, such as artificial life, emergence (and by extension, complexity), genetic algorithms, and agent-based computing.
Prey brings together themes from two earlier Crichton best-selling novels, Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain and serves as a cautionary tale about developments in science and technology, in particular, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and distributed artificial intelligence. An excerpt was first published in the January–February 2003 issue of Seed magazine. It was first published in November 2002, making it his first novel of the twenty-first century. Prey is the thirteenth novel by Michael Crichton under his own name and the twenty-third overall.
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