Prey

As a narrative device, Julia exists primarily to get Jack to the Nevada lab and to illustrate the ways in which the particles can affect a person’s personality. Her background is useful to her work as a sort of life coach for startups: “Originally trained as a child psychologist, she ended up as someone who specialized in ‘technology incubation,’ helping fledgling technology companies get started. (She used to joke she was still doing child psychology)” (8). Julia is ambitious, brilliant, and capable of making bad decisions in a pinch. But when the reader meets her, her infection with the nanobots makes her prone to erratic, paranoid behavior with Jack and a short temper with her children, whom she sees less and less.

Her behavior disturbs Jack because it is so unlike her usual temperament; he describes her as having “a real gift for seeing the humorous side of life. She was famous for her equanimity; she almost never lost her temper” (17). This contrasts starkly with the Julia who shouts at him during an argument: “You undercut me, you sabotage me, you turn the children against me […] I see what you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t. You are not supportive of me at all. After all these years of marriage, I must say, it’s a lousy thing to do to your wife” (63). Crichton paints a realistic picture of a family under duress from the pressure of a high-stress career; he demonstrates here that even without an infiltration of rapidly-evolving nanobots, professional ambition can drain emotional resources.

Her professional curiosity leads her to teach the swarms to learn, but she does not give the potential consequences of her actions enough weight; she is carried away by her hubris. The most useful characterizations of Julia come during moments of crisis. After the car accident, she tells Jack that she “didn’t mean to do anything wrong” (99). Without the influence of the swarm, she can admit her mistakes and her good intentions. Similarly, when Jack traps her in the magnetic chamber, briefly freeing her withered and dying body from the swarm, her last request is that Jack “[s]ave [her] babies” (345). Ultimately, Julia represents the loss of personal life and family in the name of professional ambition. She pays a heavy price in pursuit of Reckless Technological Innovation.

Ricky is one of Jack’s former colleagues. He is glib, smart, ambitious, insecure, and willing to lie if it will help him or protect his reputation. Ricky represents most of what bothers Jack about his industry—and the Silicon Valley culture in particular. Jack gave Ricky his first job. Even then, he thought, “With his cheerful personality and upbeat manner, Ricky made an ideal project manager, even though he tended to underplay problems, and give management unrealistic expectations about when a project would be finished” (29). In terms of his relationship to the administrators, Jack thinks, “Ricky was obsequious to management, trying to please them like a child pleasing a parent. He did it charmingly; that was how he had moved ahead in life. That was also his greatest weakness” (187).

Ricky gets himself in over his head and scrambles to save Xymos’s contract with the Department of Defense. All of his mistakes in the Xymos lab spring from the desperate ambition to salvage this contract, which he sees as his professional meal ticket. Mae understands that Ricky will pursue success at all costs, telling Jack, “I think Ricky sees Xymos as his last big chance to score. He’s been here five years. If this doesn’t work out, he’ll be too senior to start over at a new company” (184). Rather than take a loss and act ethically, Ricky prefers to stay in the good graces of the board and the government, calling in PR men as a bandaid solution rather than addressing the underlying problems. He has an inordinate amount of confidence in himself that he has done little to earn, which makes him a useful symbol of the worst aspects of Silicon Valley.

Mae’s primary function in the story is to give Jack an ally in the lab. She also gives Julia an enemy who is not Jack. In the climactic last chapters, she is the only scientist who remains uninfected, allowing them to work together as a team. Her background as a field biologist gives her a skill set that complements Jack’s—including the ability to dissect the rabbit and the knowledge to develop a plan for tracking the swarms. Their teamwork demonstrates the imperative to communicate, work in tandem, and create an environment of trust when innovating; their partnership provides a foil to both Julia’s and Ricky’s self-serving, secretive actions.

Mae is brave, brilliant, loyal to her profession, and has a sense of ethics that prompts her to keep fighting as the odds against them worsen. Her calm, quiet, methodical personality is also useful in the lab as well as in the wild:

Mae said very little, moved almost soundlessly, and never raised her voice—but she never lost an argument, either. Like many field biologists, she had developed the uncanny ability to slip into the background, to become unnoticed, almost to vanish (121).

Mae is also the first to treat Jack’s concerns seriously; he reflects that “as a field biologist, she was probably better than the others at assessing real-world risk” (156). Like Jack, Mae has skills with greater practical—as opposed to theoretical—applications to their situation. Their combined expertise in animal behavior gives them a long-term view of evolution that allows them to see the perils of reckless innovation more clearly than their ambitious counterparts.

David is a 28-year-old engineer with “an engineer’s bluntness and lack of social skills. He was also full of contradictions; although he fussed over every detail of his work and appearance, on weekends he raced a dirt bike, often coming back covered in mud” (117). David is smart enough to suspect that Ricky is not as forthcoming as he claims, and it is David who finally gives Jack the whole story of what has been happening at the fabrication lab. As he talks, Jack thinks, “Unlike Ricky, David has a very organized mind, and he told me everything, starting from the beginning” (173).

Unfortunately, David’s level-headed, analytic nature doesn’t help him when the swarms attack the storage space. Without much real-world experience outside the lab, unlike Mae, he starts to panic when the swarms hunt them down. Jack can “almost feel his terror, his overwhelming urge to flee” (217). His inability to synchronize his behavior with that of his colleagues to confuse the swarms—which leads to his death—is also telling; Crichton is again highlighting the need to work together, in trust and communication, in the high-stakes world of scientific innovation.