Prey (novel)

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Prey

First edition cover
Author	Michael Crichton
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction, Techno-thriller, horror, nanopunk
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication date	November 25, 2002
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	502
ISBN	0-00-715379-1
OCLC	50433577
Preceded by	Timeline
Followed by	State of Fear

Prey is a novel by Michael Crichton, his thirteenth under his own name and twenty-third overall, first published in November 2002, making his first novel of the twenty-first century. An excerpt was published in the January–February 2003 issue of Seed. Like Jurassic Park, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about developments in science and technology; in this case, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and distributed artificial intelligence.

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. Fields such as population dynamics and host-parasite coevolution are also at the heart of the novel.

Film rights to the book were purchased by 20th Century Fox.^[1]

Plot summary[]

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The novel is narrated by the protagonist Jack Forman, an unemployed software programmer taking the role of a house husband. His wife Julia serves as a high ranking executive at a nanorobotics company called Xymos, and claims to be working on a new revolutionary imaging technology, which takes up most of her time. She grows distant to Jack and her family, and he believes she is having an affair.

One night, Julia shows Jack a video of the Xymos nanobots being put into a human test subject. Jack is impressed, but becomes more suspicious when he notices the video was not made on the day she claimed.

Later in the night, their baby Amanda awakens in agony as her body turns red. Jack takes her to the hospital, but the doctors cannot identify the cause of her pain. She is given an MRI, and suddenly her pain stops and the skin changes disappear. Bewildered, Jack returns home to a strangely indifferent Julia who leaves in a hurry, claiming to go on an urgent business trip.

Strange events lead Jack to suspect something bigger is going on: their son Eric claims he saw "silver men" cleaning the house in the middle of the night; Jack finds a strange device underneath Amanda's bed; memory chips on their son's MP3 player turn to dust; Julia becomes abusive to her family, and is seen driving with an unidentifiable passenger. Julia is injured in a car crash, and Jack is recruited to consult at Xymos, as the project manager, Ricky, is having issues with the nanobots.

Jack is taken to the Xymos research facility in Nevada's Basin Desert, where he is given a tour of the lab, meets the programming team, and is shown a machine used to make the nanobot assemblers from bacteria, though Ricky refuses to show the source code for the nanobots. Ricky later claims that contractors improperly installed filters in a vent, which caused assemblers, bacteria, and nanobots to be blown into the desert, evolving and forming autonomous swarms. These swarms appear to be clouds of solar-powered self-sufficient nanobots, reproducing and evolving (necroevolution) rapidly. The swarms exhibit predatory behavior, killing animals in the wild, using code that Jack himself worked on. Most alarmingly, the swarm possess rudimentary intelligence, the ability to quickly learn and innovate. Jack also learns that Julia helped make the swarms more benign, but they regressed when she left. The swarms wander around the plant during the day, but leave when strong winds blow or night falls.

The nanoswarm kills a rabbit outside the complex, and Jack goes outside with Mae to inspect; they find that the rabbit died of suffocation, as the nanobots blocked its bronchial tubes. Jack is attacked by the swarms, and barely manages to get through the airlock into the lab before falling unconscious from anaphylactic shock.

Persuaded by Jack, the team decides to destroy the swarm, fearing a grey goo plague that could endanger humanity. They believe the swarm must have nested in the desert, and attempt to find the nest by tagging the bots with radioactive isotopes and following them at night. Under the cover of a strong wind, the team goes to a storage shack to find the isotopes and build a spray device. As the wind dies down, four swarms attack the shack and kill David and Rosie. The rest of the team are forced to take shelter in parked cars.

Jack and Mae manage to escape to the lab, but Charley falls unconscious outside his car. When the others refuse to help, Jack manages to get himself and the semi-conscious Charley to safety.

As night falls, Jack, Mae, and Bobby set out to find the swarms. While searching, they discover that the swarms are moving the now deceased Rosie through the desert. The team is also shocked to discover that the swarms can replicate the physical features, perceptions, and motions of humans when they see the swarms form replicas of Ricky, David, and Rosie.

The group follows the body to find the swarms nesting in a cave. A Xymos helicopter arrives and wards off the swarms using its draft. Mae and Jack then venture into the cave and exterminate the swarms, their nest, and their organic assembly plant using explosive thermite caps.

Returning to the plant, Jack, Mae, and Bobby are greeted by Julia, who had discharged herself from the hospital and was brought in by the chopper. Julia's behavior is extremely aberrant; she seems to pay heed to nothing except enticing Jack and kissing him, even when Charley is found killed by a swarm in a sabotaged communications room. Jack cannot understand how the swarm got inside the airtight building, why Charley would have disabled the facility's communications, or why Julia and Ricky are acting very out-of-character.

Mae discovers security footage of when they were in the desert. To Jack's horror, the video reveals that Julia and Ricky had an affair, and shows Charley engaging in a vicious fight with Ricky and Vince. All of them end up in the communications room where Julia kisses a subdued Charley, injecting a swarm into his mouth, while Ricky sabotages the communication systems.

Eventually, Jack and Mae realize that everyone in the facility except themselves have been infected by a symbiotic version of the nanobot swarms. These nanobots do not show aggressive predatory behavior. Instead, the nanobots slowly devour and take over their hosts to produce more nanobots, and affect their decision making. The bots then control them, allowing them to travel and contaminate others.

Jack comes up with a plan to destroy this new strain. Mae and Jack drink vials containing a form of phage that kills the nanobot-producing E. coli bacteria and thus would protect them from infection by the nanobots. Jack then takes a sample of the phage and plans to pour it into the sprinkler system and drench everyone with it. He has Mae alert Julia and the infected team, who set out to stop Jack. In the vicious struggle that ensues, Jack is captured and thrown into a magnetic chamber. Jack feigns surrender when Julia walks in to interrogate him, but reactivates the magnetic chamber, remembering the incident with Amanda in the MRI. Julia's body disintegrates as a swarm is pulled away by the magnetic field to temporarily reveal the real Julia, who has been consumed by the parasitic swarm. Before the swarm can repossess her body, Julia begs Jack to forgive her, says she loves him, and tells him to stop the swarms and save their children, as they have been infected too. Motivated, Jack runs to the roof, fights off the infected team, and finally manages to place the sample into the sprinkler system.

To prevent the sprinkler system from triggering, Ricky disables the plant's safety network. This plays in Jack's favor, as Mae has already allowed the phage into the assembly line, causing it to reproduce rapidly. The assembly line is rapidly overheating because of the de-activated safety system. If Ricky and Julia don't turn on the safety system, the assembly line will burst, filling the lab with the phage. The infected, now doomed either way, choose to re-activate the network and get drenched with the phage. Jack and Mae escape the facility in a helicopter shortly before the facility explodes due to a methane gas leak combined with thermite Mae has placed in the building.

After returning home, Jack doses his children and sister with the phage. Mae calls the U.S. Army and sends a sample of the phage to her lab.

Jack puts together all the missing links. The corrosion of the memory chips in his home's electronics and Amanda's skin rash were caused by nanobot assemblers spread by Julia. The MRI's strong magnetic field detached the assemblers from Amanda. Knowing this, Julia called in the Xymos special team to scan Amanda's room. The person whom Jack spotted in Julia's car was in fact the Ricky-swarm. Xymos had intentionally released the swarm into the desert so that it would evolve to stay in a cohesive group in the wind, but called him in to destroy the wild strain once it became uncontrollable.

Characters[]

Major characters[]

• Jack Forman – A former team lead/manager at MediaTronics working on distributed, multi-agent systems and advanced computer algorithms
• Julia Forman – Jack's wife, Vice president of the Xymos company.
• Mae Chang – A field biologist on Jack's consulting team
• Ricky Morse – A friend of Jack's, works for Xymos
• Charley Davenport – A member of Jack's team who specializes in genetic algorithms.
• David Brooks – An engineer on the team.
• Rosie Castro – A specialist in natural language processing.
• The "Swarm" – Any of the many predatory clouds of nano-machines that "eat" animals serving as an antagonistic force in the novel. "Eating" means suffocating the animals and growing bacteria on them, thereby producing more nano-machine assemblers, and more nano-machines. A notable aspect of the swarm is its capacity for fully Lamarckian evolution, as each cloud's members can effectively choose exactly which aspects are to be transmitted or modified down into the next generation through manipulation of the E. coli bacteria used to produce the new robots.
• Vince Reynolds – the maintenance operator of the Xymos lab.
• Amanda – Jack and Julia's baby daughter.
• Nicole – Jack and Julia's preteen daughter.
• Eric – Jack and Julia's son.

Minor characters[]

• Ellen – Jack's sister from out of town. She takes care of his kids while he is in Nevada and believes Julia is on stimulants.
• Don Gross – Jack's former boss, who fired Jack.
• Gary – Jack's lawyer.
• Maria – Jack and Julia's housekeeper.
• Annie – Jack's headhunter.
• Carol – Julia's assistant.
• Mary – Ricky's wife.
• Bobby Lembeck – Computer programmer at Xymos
• Tim Berman – The man that took over Jack's job.

Reception[]

Jim Holt, writing for The New York Times, found the book "absurd" but exciting, and said that he "kept turning the pages feverishly".^[2]

Peter Guttridge, writing for The Observer, said that it finds Crichton "doing what he does best", in that he takes "the very latest scientific advances" and shows "their potentially terrifying underbelly".^[3]

Even while pointing out the flaws in Crichton's science, in Prey, multiple critics have praised the book's impact and overall message.^[4][5]

See also[]

• Nanotechnology in fiction
• The Invincible

References[]

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