Prey

by Michael Crichton

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds—and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

I’m worried about the baby, but I had to make her sick, too. It was her only hope. I think I’m okay, at least for the moment. But of course the odds aren’t good: most of the people involved in this business are already dead. And there are so many things I can’t know for sure. The facility is destroyed, but I don’t know if we did it in time.

I have ringing in my ears, which is a bad sign. And I feel a vibrating in my chest and abdomen. The baby is spitting up, not really vomiting. I am feeling dizzy. I hope I don’t lose consciousness. The kids need me, especially the little one. They’re frightened. I don’t blame them. I am, too.

“Nicky wears a bra-a! Nicky wears a bra-a!” while Nicole, too dignified to pursue him, gritted her teeth and yelled, “Dad? He’s doing it again! Dad!” And I would have to go chase Eric and tell him not to touch his sister’s things.

the absolute dread I felt after reading the prologue and it immediately changing to this guy's family

Xymos licensed some agent-based algorithms that your team wrote.” “No, I didn’t know. Which algorithms?” “To control a particle network.” “Your cameras are networked? All those little cameras communicate with each other?” “Yes,” she said. “They’re a swarm, actually.”

The technician flicked a switch and the pump began to chatter; it made a lot of noise. But I could still hear my daughter screaming. And then, abruptly, she stopped. She was completely silent. “Uh-oh,” I said. I looked at the technician and the nurse. Their faces registered shock. We all thought the same thing, that something terrible had happened. My heart began to pound. The technician hastily shut down the pumps and we hurried back into the room. My daughter was lying there, still strapped down, breathing heavily, but apparently fine. She blinked her eyes slowly, as if dazed. Already her skin was noticeably a lighter shade of pink, with patches of normal color. The rash was fading right before our eyes.

So the MRI kills the nanobots

“Five days ago. But it’s a completely different situation. This case involved a forty-two-year-old naturalist sleeping out in the Sierras, some wild-flower expert. There was a particular kind of flower or something. Anyway, he was hospitalized in Sacramento. And he had the same clinical course as your daughter—sudden unexplained onset, no fever, painful erythematous reaction.”

That's the person they tested on, isn't it

I found myself staring at the electrical outlet on the wall underneath the crib. A small plastic box was plugged into the outlet. I pulled it out and looked at it. It was a two-inch cube, a surge suppressor by the look of it, an ordinary commercial product, made in Thailand. The input/output voltages were molded into the plastic. A white label ran across the bottom, reading PROP. SSVT, with a bar code. It was one of those stickers that companies put on their inventory. I turned the cube over in my hand. Where had this come from? I’d been in charge of the house for the last six months. I knew what was where. And certainly Amanda didn’t need a surge suppressor in her room. You only needed that for sensitive electronic equipment, like computers.

I found myself staring at the green circuit board. It was covered by a fine layer of grayish dust, like lint from a clothes dryer, that obscured all the electronic components.

I understood now where the dust had come from. It was the disintegrated remains of the chip. “Can you fix it, Dad?” Eric said. “Can you?” What could have caused this? The rest of the motherboard seemed fine. The controller chip was untouched. Only the memory chip was damaged.

We can even pause the camera, using a strong magnetic field. When we are finished, we simply shunt the blood through an intravenous loop surrounded by a strong magnetic field, removing the particles, and then send the patient home.

Then as I watched, her lips turned dark red, and then black. She didn’t seem to notice. The blackness flowed away from her mouth across her cheeks and over her lower face, and onto her neck. I held my breath. I felt great danger. The blackness now flowed in a sheet down her body until she was entirely covered, as if with a cloak. Only the upper half of her face remained exposed. Her features were composed; in fact she seemed oblivious, just staring into space, dark lips silently moving. Watching her, I felt a chill that ran deep into my bones. Then a moment later the black sheet slid to the floor and vanished.

It's possible Julia is working on a project that's meant to be kept secret, and that's why she's being so weird

When I awoke in the morning, I saw that Julia’s side of the bed was still made up, her pillow uncreased. She hadn’t come home last night at all. I checked the telephone messages; there were none.

Things are about to start happening, aren't they?

There’s one problem with all psychological knowledge—nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn’t work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I know, unexplained.

we know that people can think about themselves indefinitely. Some people think of little else. Yet people never seem to change as a result of their intensive introspection. They never understand themselves better. It’s very rare to find genuine self-knowledge.

There’s an old question in artificial intelligence about whether a program can ever be aware of itself. Most programmers will say it was impossible. People have tried to do it, and failed. But there’s a more fundamental version of the question, a philosophical question about whether any machine can understand its own workings.

“What about the MRI?” The doctor said the MRI results were not relevant, because the machine had malfunctioned and had never examined Amanda. “In fact, we’re worried about all the readings for the last few days,” he said. “Because apparently the machine was slowly breaking down.” “How do you mean?” “It was being corroded or something. All the memory chips were turning to powder.” I felt a chill,

Ohhh the nanobots are already out That is not good!

“We’re having some problems with distributed systems that we’ve sold to customers.” “Which ones?” “Well, PREDPREY.” “That’s one of the old ones,” I said. “Who sold that?” PREDPREY was a system we’d designed over a year ago. Like most of our programs, it had been based on biological models. PREDPREY was a goal-seeking program based on predator/prey dynamics. But it was extremely simple in its structure. “Well, Xymos wanted something very simple,” Tim said. “You sold PREDPREY to Xymos?” “Right. Licensed, actually. With a contract to support it. That’s driving us crazy.” “Why?” “It isn’t working right, apparently. Goal seeking has gone haywire. A lot of the time, the program seems to lose its goal.”

I love all the setup this book has, the "losing sight of its goal" is going to be overfixed so it starts actively targeting things, isn't it

Reinforcers were program weights that sustained the goals. The reason you needed them was that since the networked agents could learn, they might learn in a way that caused them to drift away from the goal. You needed a way to store the original goal so it didn’t get lost.

“Have you been out to that plant?” Mary said. I thought I detected an uneasy tone. “No, I haven’t, but—” “Julia is there a lot, isn’t she? What does she say about it?” Definitely worried. “Well, not much. I gather they have new technology that’s very hush-hush. Why?” She hesitated. “Maybe it’s my imagination …”

ha HA! I was right!

“She mention a black cloak?” I felt suddenly slowed down. Moving very slowly. “What?” “The other night Ricky was talking about a black cloak, being covered in a black cloak. It was late, he was tired, he was sort of babbling.”

There was nobody in the car. Then, as Julia made the right turn, the guy popped up again, like he had been bent over, getting something from the glove compartment. And then the car was gone. And in an instant all my distress came flooding back, like a hot pain that spread across my chest and body. I felt short of breath, and a little dizzy. There was somebody in the car.

I kept trying to see his face but I never could. The features were blurred by the windshield, by the light shifting as she backed down the drive … I couldn’t see the eyes, or the cheekbones, or the mouth. In my memory, the whole face was dark and indistinct.

“Jack. It was an accident.” The medics were maneuvering around the motorcycle. I had to watch where I was going. “Of course it was.” “It’s not what you think, Jack.” I said, “What is, Julia?” She seemed to be delirious. Her voice seemed to drift in and out. “I know what you’re thinking.” Her hand gripped my arm. “Promise me you won’t get involved in this, Jack.” I didn’t say anything, I just walked with her. She squeezed me harder. “Promise me you’ll stay out of it.” “I promise,”

Was the "cloak" controlling her partially? I'm assuming that's what the shadow guy was at least

I heard something about “the black clouds,” that were “not black anymore.”

When I was about ten feet away the lights came on, the engine started, and the van roared past me, and drove down the highway. As it passed, I had a glimpse of the driver. He was wearing a shiny suit of some kind, like silvery plastic, and a tight hood of the same material. I thought I saw some funny, silver apparatus hanging around his neck. It looked like a gas mask, except it was silver. But I wasn’t sure. As the car drove away, I noticed the rear bumper had two green stickers, each with a big X. That was the Xymos logo. But it was the license plate that really caught my eye. It was a Nevada plate. That van had come from the fabrication plant,

what exactly is the problem?” A growling voice. “Apparently, the plant released some material into the environment. It was an accident. Now, several dead animals have been found out in the desert. In the vicinity of the plant.”

“You coming out to work at the plant?” “To consult,” I said. “Yes.” “Consulting’s the way to go,” he said, nodding as if I were an ally. “No responsibility. No liability. Just give your opinion, and watch them not take it.”

Sorry to rush you, Jack, but … you know, I’ve got a lot to show you.” “Is there a time problem?” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Like many field biologists, she had developed the uncanny ability to slip into the background, to become unnoticed, almost to vanish.

I imagine you'd kind of need that in order to be a field biologist. If you're loud and noticable you're going to scare all the animals away

“And what is going on here?” He stopped before a small cubicle on the other side of the room. “Julia couldn’t tell you, because it was classified.”

hahaHA! I knew it!

“The medical imaging project was just an afterthought,” he said, “a minor commercial application of the technology we are already developing.” “Uh-huh. Which is?” “Military.” “Xymos is doing military work?” “Yes. Under contract.”

Well no wonder it's starting to kill things

They imagined something very small, maybe the size of a dragonfly—a target too small to hit. But there were problems with power supply, with small control surfaces, and with resolution using such a small lens. They needed a bigger lens.” I nodded. “And so you thought of a swarm of nanocomponents.” “That’s right.”

There was nothing in the bird brain that said, “When thus-and-such happens, start flocking.” On the contrary, flocking simply emerged within the group as a result of much simpler, low-level rules. Rules like, “Stay close to the birds nearest you, but don’t bump into them.” From those rules, the entire group flocked in smooth coordination.

it was called emergent behavior. The technical definition of emergent behavior was behavior that occurred in a group but was not programmed into any member of the group. Emergent behavior could occur in any population, including a computer population. Or a robot population. Or a nanoswarm. I said to Ricky, “Your problem was emergent behavior in the swarm?” “Exactly.”

“You used PREDPREY to program your individual units?” “Right. We used those rules.” “Well, the behavior looks pretty good to me,” I said, watching the screen. “Why is there a problem?” “We’re not sure.” “What does that mean?” “It means we know there’s a problem, but we’re not sure what’s causing it.

Those kettles in the next room were indeed tanks for controlled microbial growth. But Ricky wasn’t making beer—he was making microbes, and I had no doubt about the reason why. Unable to construct genuine nanoassemblers, Xymos was using bacteria to crank out their molecules. This was genetic engineering, not nanotechnology.

“Did anyone think it might not be a good idea to use cells that can live inside human beings?” “Not really,” he said. “Frankly that wasn’t a consideration. We just wanted a well-studied cell that was fully documented

“For how long?” Ricky bit his lip. “Three weeks.” “And you were at full production?” He nodded. “We figure we vented approximately twenty-five kilos of contaminants.” “And what were the contaminants?” “A little of everything. We’re not sure of exactly what.” “So you vented E. coli, assemblers, finished molecules, everything?” “Correct.

“Ricky,” I said. “What are we looking at?” “I was hoping you’d tell me.” “It looks like an agent swarm. Is that your camera swarm?” “No. It’s something else.” “How do you know?” “Because we can’t control it. It doesn’t respond to our radio signals.”

“So you have a runaway swarm.” “Yes.” “Acting autonomously.” “Yes.” “And this has been going on for …” “Days. About ten days.” “Ten days?” I frowned. “How is that possible, Ricky? The swarm’s a collection of micro-robotic machines. Why haven’t they decayed, or run out of power? And why exactly can’t you control them?

“You think that swarm is capable of hiding?” “I think it’s capable of adapting. In fact, I know it is.” He sighed. “Anyway, it’s more than just one swarm, Jack.” “There’s more than one?” “There’s at least three. Maybe more, by now.” I felt a momentary blankness, a kind of sleepy gray confusion that washed over me. I suddenly couldn’t think, I couldn’t put it together. “What are you saying?” “I’m saying it reproduces, Jack,” he said. “The fucking swarm reproduces.”

The three clouds converged on the terrified bunny, which was moving fast, a whitish blur on the screen. The clouds swirled after it with surprising speed. The behavior was clear: they were hunting.

“You’ve got a breakaway robotic nanoswarm. That some idiot made self-powered and self-sustaining.” “You think we can get it back?” “No,” I said. “From what I’ve seen, there’s not a chance in hell.” Ricky sighed, and shook his head. “But you can certainly get rid of it,” I said. “You can kill it.”

But that first day at the laboratory,

I'm going to be honest this entirely broke my immersion, the main character being like "oh yeah btw I live and also figured out how to kill it bc otherwise I wouldn't live" is an amazing way to take someone out of the story

I’d seen too many demos of robots carrying out some task—like cooperating to push a box around the room—which was interpreted by observers as intelligent behavior, when in fact the robots were stupid, minimally programmed, and cooperating by accident. A lot of behavior looked smarter than it was.

I saw her raise her head, as if she was looking toward the horizon, and while she did so, she uncorked a test tube and slipped a slice of stomach lining into the glass. She put it in her pocket. Then looked back down. No one watching the video would have seen what she did.

If the particles include the nanobots that could cause them to spread to the inside of the building, if even the smallest thing spreads them they could spread to everywhere and infest everything

my hasty movement triggered the swarm, which immediately stopped, and swirled backward to the door again, blocking my path. There it remained, pulsing streaks of silver, like a blade glinting in the sun. Blocking my path. It took me a moment to realize the significance of that. My movement hadn’t triggered the swarm to pursue me. The swarm hadn’t chased me at all. Instead it had moved to block my way. It was anticipating my movement. That wasn’t in the code.