Prey

Jack wakes on Mae’s lab table. She has an IV in his left arm. She says he had an allergic reaction—likely to the toxin E. coli—and his throat was closing. After his head clears, Mae tells Jack that she is having problems with a fermentation unit. Jack says he wants someone to tell him what’s actually happening.

David tells Jack everything that Ricky had been avoiding, revealing that the particles worked well indoors but had been blown away when they were first tested outdoors, six weeks ago. He also says that over five hundred kilos of contaminants got into their air due to the improperly filtered vent, not the fifty kilos that Ricky claimed. David also says that shortly after they realized they couldn’t control the swarms, their cars wouldn’t start: The gamma assemblers eroded their memory chips. Jack and David realize that the nanobots comprising the swarms work better in hotter temperatures. This lets them assemble autonomously in the desert without requiring the heat of the devices inside the laboratory. Given that these new agents have limited memory and that they can innovate and solve problems as a collective, David calls them a “mechanical plague” that is evolving (176). He also thinks the swarm returns because it is looking for Julia. That’s why it wants to get inside.

Jack calls Julia but has to leave a message because she is in X-ray testing. The others tell him that Julia’s idea had been to entertain the swarm like a child. She gave it toys and games, colored blocks and tests. Julia wanted to keep it alive, although everyone could see the danger coming. The smaller swarm had been like her pet. She talked to it, and it followed her. It functioned like an eardrum when she spoke, and eventually started making noises.

Jack believes the swarm’s accelerated learning is “a function of past learning” (181), meaning that, after a slow buildup, distributed systems start making big leaps forward. He uses evolution on earth as a good example. It took only four million years to go from upright apes to early humans to modern man after billions of years as cells. Julia’s teaching had sped up the evolutionary process, which means that it will be more difficult to kill the swarms each hour. David says Ricky won’t approve any plans to kill the swarms.

Mae tells them there is a problem with the Theta-d stocks: They are growing unnaturally, and they have a virus. If the bacteria are infected, they’ll have to shut down everything, but Mae thinks Ricky has too large a financial stake in Xymos to back off of the project. She tells Jack to be careful.

Jack tells the team they have to kill the swarm. He thinks their best chance is at night when it sinks after lowering its power. If they can tag it, they can track it and then find it at night. Mae suggests using radioisotopes as a tracking agent, but they’ll need to go out and spray the tracking agents now if they want to have a chance. They all agree to go except for Ricky, who argues against it. He pulls Jack aside and forbids him from going out. Jack threatens to call the Pentagon and says he doesn’t care if they lose funding.

After losing his temper, Ricky suddenly asks Jack if he’s acting weird, saying his wife, Mary, has said he is behaving strangely of late. Jack acknowledges that Ricky has been on edge. Ricky chalks it up to stress and thanks him before leaving him alone.

Privately, Mae tells Jack she needs to see the rabbit again. She has tested the tissue from its stomach and says they have a problem.