Prey (novel)
It's hard to believe that a week ago my biggest problem was finding a job. It seems almost laughable now. But then, things never turn out the way you think they will.
Prey is a 2002 sci-fi thriller novel by Michael Crichton, this time centering around Nanomachines that have gone wildly out of control and threaten lives, and the main characters must prevent them from getting any more out-of-hand. As is typical for Crichton, he goes into great detail on the technical aspects of the nanotech; mostly, in this case, computer programming and evolutionary theory.
The story focuses on Jack Forman, a House Husband and former computer programmer in distributed systems who is looking for a new job while his wife Julia brings in the cash. Lately things in Jack's life have not been going too well: he was fired from his previous job, cannot find a new one, and to top it all off, his wife has been acting very strangely as of late, working long hours and becoming increasingly hostile and irrational. At the same time, strange things begin happening around the house: rooms are disturbed, the baby comes down with a nasty full-body rash that disappears just as quickly, and there are extra electronic devices around the house he's never seen before. All this comes to a head when he is hired by his wife's company as a consultant on the same project she's recently been so heavily involved in. Eager to get to the bottom of everything, he accepts and is flown out to a remote facility in the Nevada desert...
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted. The nanoswarms are simply trying to protect and propagate themselves (exactly what they were programmed to do). However, they are also not smart enough to be reasoned with: not true AI.
- Body Horror: Any time the nanoswarms interact with organic material, it's probably not going to be pretty.
- Foreshadowing: Midway through the novel, Charley wonders if the nanoswarms could affect human brains. Turns out they can.
- House Husband: Jack
- Grey Goo: Not present, for once. The nanoswarms have more specific tasks programmed into them.
- Gone Horribly Right: The "wild" nanoswarms. They are doing exactly what they were programmed to do: solve problems about how to survive on their own.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: The "infector" nanoswarms, which are parasitically controlling humans in order to survive, something they were never intended to do.
- Hive Mind: The nanoswarms work using distributed intelligence, which isn't quite this trope, but it is used as a layman's metaphor in the book at one point.
- Mechanical Evolution: The reason the swarms are so dangerous is that they've been outfitted with learning and problem-solving algorithms. As such, their behavior becomes steadily more complex and sophisticated as time goes on.
- Mechanical Lifeform: Or as close to one as you can get in hard Sci-fi.
- Nanomachines: The focus of the book.
- Organic Technology: The construction process for the swarms involves E. coli bacteria (the techs wanted a thoroughly-documented bacterium to work with). The "wild" swarms therefore hunt down and kill animals in order to feed the bacteria within them as part of their reproductive process. A few swarms learn how to "benignly" invade a human body to use as a host and survive.
- Puppeteer Parasite: It's not entirely clear how much control the infector swarms have over their human hosts, nor how intelligent they are. They seem to be accessing their host's memories and directing their actions to some extent, but the hosts are implied to have at least some measure of free will left.
- Science Is Bad: Averted. The book mentions the numerous very useful, revolutionary technologies that could come about with nanotech. It also stresses that the technology is also very dangerous, and should be handled cautiously. The company in the novel just did some incredibly stupid things, which is why the danger happens.
- Shown Their Work: It's Michael Crichton. The fact that it is impossible to quickly build several billion nanobots individually (the "build-time problem") is directly addressed, for one.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Thermite, as it turns out, can vaporize a nanoswarm.
- Surveillance Drone: This was the task the nanotech was commissioned for. By arranging themselves in certain formations, the swarms can turn themselves into "eyes" in order to record images.
- The Swarm: The nanobots are organized in such units in order to accomplish tasks. They can kill things by clogging air passageways and letting the E. coli cause severe allergic reactions.
- They Look Like Us Now: The swarms eventually begin to imitate human forms, implied to be random behavior as part of their learning algorithms. They accomplish this by carefully arranging themselves and aligning their solar panels, reflecting light into the images they need.
- Transhuman: Infected!Julia claims that the nanoswarms are forming a symbiotic relationship with humans, but it is horribly clear, when the swarm is stripped away, that they are really killing the real Julia one small bit at a time.
- Weaksauce Weakness: Wind. The nanoswarms have to stick very close to the ground whenever wind comes up, or the swarm will disperse and the bots will deactivate.