Prey

by Michael Crichton

“A toxin from E. coli bacteria? Is that what you mean?” “Right. Proteolytic toxin, probably.” “And where would a toxin like that come from?” “From the swarm,” she said. That made no sense at all. According to Ricky the E. coli bacteria were only used to manufacture precursor molecules. “But bacteria wouldn’t be present in the swarm itself,” I said. “I don’t know, Jack. I think they could be.”

Could the swarm be carrying it along with them, or the place they return to each night has the bacteria. That might be why they "hunt" animals, they need the cells that would keep the bacteria alive

“The twenty-five kilos of material that was blown by the exhaust fan into the environment because of a missing filter …” “Who said it was twenty-five kilos?” “Ricky did.” “Oh, no, Jack,” David said. “We vented stuff for days. We must have vented five or six hundred kilos of contaminants—bacteria, molecules, assemblers.”

Actually, the processor chips themselves were fine. But the memory chips had eroded. They’d literally turned to dust.” I thought, Oh shit. I said, “Could you figure out why?” “Sure. It wasn’t any big mystery, Jack. The erosion had the characteristic signature of gamma assemblers.

“The thing you have to keep in mind, Jack, is that these assemblers can work at room temperature. If anything, the desert heat’s even better for them. Hotter is more efficient.” For a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about. What difference did it make about room temperature or desert heat? What did that have to do with memory chips in cars? And then suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. “Holy shit,”

“Which means that the swarms are reproducing.” “Yes. They are.” “And the individual agents have memory.” “Yes. A small amount.” “And they don’t need much, that’s the whole point of distributed intelligence. It’s collective. So they have intelligence, and since they have memory, they can learn from experience.” “Yes.” “And the PREDPREY program means they can solve problems. And the program generates enough random elements to let them innovate.” “Right. Yes.” My head throbbed.

“I’d like to know,” I said, “why this thing wasn’t destroyed a long time ago.” David said nothing. He just smoothed his tie, and looked uncomfortable. “Because you realize,” I said, “that you’re talking about a mechanical plague. That’s what you’ve got here. It’s just like a bacterial plague, or a viral plague. Except it’s mechanical organisms. You’ve got a fucking man-made plague.” He nodded. “Yes.” “That’s evolving.” “Yes.” “And it’s not limited by biological rates of evolution. It’s probably evolving much faster.”

If you compressed the history of life on earth into twenty-four hours, then multicellular organisms appeared in the last twelve hours, dinosaurs in the last hour, the earliest men in the last forty seconds, and modern men less than one second ago.

“You remember that tissue sample I cut from the stomach? Well, I looked at it under the microscope a few minutes ago.” “And?” “I’m afraid we have big problems, Jack.”

It's replicating there, isn't it

“Is it airtight?” I said. “Not really.”

Doesn't that mean the swarm could be in there somewhere?

Mae crouched down, turned it on its back, laid open the carcass. “Jeez,” Rosie said. I was startled to see that the exposed flesh was no longer smooth and pink. Instead, it was roughened everywhere, and in a few places looked as if it had been scraped. And it was covered by a milky white coating.

“It’s been partially eaten.” “Eaten? By what?” “Bacteria.” “Wait a minute,” Charley Davenport said. “You think this is caused by Theta-d? You think the E. coli is eating it?”

“I bet if we come back in another hour, this white stuff will be gone, and we’ll see black forming all over the body. New black nanoparticles. And eventually there’ll be enough for a new swarm.” She nodded. “Yes. I think so, too.”

Oh so if it reaches civilization that would be bad bad

The flock wheeled and came back, then settled to the ground a hundred yards away. “Maybe they’re too small for the swarms to bother with,” Mae said. “Not enough flesh on their bodies.” “Maybe.” I was thinking there might be another answer. But to be sure, I would have to check the code.

“It burns very hot—three thousand degrees—and so bright you can’t look directly at it. And it’ll melt steel for welding.” “How much of that have we got?” I said to Rosie. “Because we can use it tonight.” “There’s four boxes back there.” She plucked one tube from the box. “So how do you set ‘em off?” “Be careful, Rosie. That’s a magnesium wrapper. Any decent heat source will ignite it.” “Even matches?” “If you want to lose your hand.

“I’m picking up some instability. Wind’s fluctuating at twelve knots.” “Okay,” I said. “We don’t need to hear every little change, Bobby.” “I’m seeing some instability, is all.” “I think we’re okay for the moment, Bobby.”

Does this guy realize they could all die if the wind gets too weak? He's acting like he hasn't

The entire set of particle behaviors was marked as an object call to a something titled “compstat_do.” “Ricky,” I said, “what’s ‘compstat_do’? Where is it?” “Should be there.” “It’s not.” “I don’t know. Maybe it’s compiled.”

“You can’t leave now.” “Why not?” “Because it’s too late. They’re here.”

I said softly, “Let go of the doorknob. It’s not doing any good.” Finally, he let go, and sat back on the ground. He began to cry, head in hands.

Honestly that's a reasonable reaction

Ordinarily, genetic algorithms—which modeled reproduction to arrive at solutions—ordinarily, they ran between 500 and 5,000 generations to arrive at an optimization. If these swarms were reproducing every three hours, it meant they had turned over something like 100 generations in the last two weeks.

attacking predators were often confused when the herd fled in all directions. Sometimes they literally stopped cold. Show a predator too many moving targets and it often chased none. The same thing was true of flocking birds and schooling fish—

That makes a lot of sense, actually. If each of the birds flew off so rapidly the swarm could only chase one, and it was trying to chase things as a group, then it would just freeze. No one target would be closer than the others, and without a complicated decision-making code(which we're repeatedly told the code must be kept small and simple to work) the swarms wouldn't be able to agree on a target to chase.

he found that putting paint on an animal guaranteed it would be killed in the next attack. That was the power of difference. So the message was simple. Stay together. Stay the same. That was our best chance. But I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Suddenly, the swarm rose up, and began to move again. But it wasn’t coming toward us. Instead, it moved on a diagonal over the desert, heading back toward the door in the power building. When it came to the door, it stopped, and swirled in place. “What the hell?” Charley said. I knew what it was. So did Mae. “It just tracked us,” she said. “Backward.”

“Definitely stuck in a loop,” Charley said. I waited. I hadn’t been able to review all the changes they’d made to PREDPREY, because the central module was missing. But the original program had a randomizing element built into it, to handle situations exactly like this.

oh no

Like a silent black mist, nanoparticles began to come into the room underneath the west door. Soon more particles entered, all around the door frame.

Soon a kind of undifferentiated fog filled the room. I felt pinpricks all over my body, and I was sure the others felt it, too. David started moaning again, but Rosie was right beside him, encouraging him, urging him to keep it together. Suddenly, with shocking speed the fog cleared, the particles coalescing into two fully formed columns that now stood directly before us, rising and falling in dark ripples. Seen this close, the swarms exuded an unmistakable sense of menace, almost malevolence. Their deep thrumming sound was clearly audible, but intermittently I heard an angry hiss, like a snake. But they did not attack us. Just as I had hoped, the programming deficits worked for us. Confronted by a cluster of coordinated prey, these predators were stymied. They did nothing at all.

And then, in an instant, everything went to hell. David Brooks bolted.

The moment David Brooks reached the black surface, his feet shot out from under him, as if he had stepped on ice. He howled in pain as he slammed onto the concrete, and immediately tried to scramble to his feet again, but he couldn’t get up; he kept slipping and falling, again and again. His eyeglasses shattered; the frames cut his nose. His lips were coated with swirling black residue. He started to have trouble breathing. Rosie was still screaming as the second swarm descended on David, and the black spread across his face, onto his eyes, into his hair. His movements became increasingly frantic, he moaned pitifully like an animal,

David was now rolling on the ground, black from head to toe. The third swarm had enveloped him. It was difficult to see through the dancing particles. It looked as though David’s mouth was a dark hole, his eyeballs completely black. I thought he might be blind. His breath came in ragged gasps, with little choking sounds. The swarm was flowing into his mouth like a black river. His body began to shudder. He clutched at his neck. His feet drummed on the floor. I was sure he was dying.

she sprinted across the shed into the next room, shouting “David! David!” His hand, black as a miner’s, stretched toward her. She grabbed his wrist. And in the same moment she fell, slipping on the black floor just as he had done. She kept saying his name, until she began to cough, and a black rim appeared on her lips.

“You think this is imitation?” “I think this is a form of imitation, yes.” “It’s trying to make itself appear like us?” “Yes.”

It was theoretically possible that the silver could be precisely tilted to produce prismatic colors, but that implied enormous sophistication of movement. It was more logical to imagine that the particles had another method to create colors. And that meant I hadn’t been told the truth about the particles, either. Ricky had lied to me yet again.

Mae was coughing weakly; her breaths shallow. I had the feeling she wouldn’t survive.

Can the particles ride into the main building through the character's lungs?

“Ricky,” I said, “I came out here on the helicopter with a bunch of PR guys. Who notified them there’s a PR problem here?” “I don’t know about any PR guys.” “They’d been told not to get out of the helicopter. That it was dangerous here.” He shook his head. “I have no idea … I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Parasitism and symbiosis were the true basis for evolutionary change. These processes lay at the heart of all evolution, and had been present from the very beginning. Lynn Margulis was famous for demonstrating that bacteria had originally developed nuclei by swallowing other bacteria.

Ricky was bright; he knew about genetic algorithms; he knew the biological background for current trends in programming. He knew that self-organization was inevitable. He knew that emergent forms were unpredictable. He knew that evolution involved interaction with n forms. He knew all that, and he did it anyway. He did, or Julia did.

I looked at the monitor in front of me. It showed views of the desert outside, rotating images from all the security cameras. One camera showed my dirt bike, lying on its side, near the door to the power station. Another camera showed the outside of the storage shed, with the door swinging open and shut, revealing the outline of Rosie’s body inside. Two people had died today. I had almost died. And now my family, which yesterday had been the most important thing in my life, seemed distant and petty.

Silhouetted against this sky was a young man with short hair. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and looked like a surfer. I couldn’t see his face clearly in the failing light, but even so, watching the way he moved, I thought there was something familiar about him. “We got any floodlights out there?” Charley said. He was walking around, holding his bowl of pasta, still eating.

How did it know he was eating pasta? Do they have a way of seeing inside the building?

“The program instruction is more generalized than that. It simply directs the agents to attain the goal. So we are seeing one possible emergent solution. Which is more advanced than the previous version. Before, it had trouble making a stable 2-D image. Now it’s modeling in three dimensions.” I glanced at the programmers. They had stricken looks on their faces. They knew exactly how big an advance they were witnessing. The transition to three dimensions meant that not only was the swarm now imitating our external appearance, it was also imitating our behavior.

So there’s an argument that the whole structure of consciousness, and the human sense of self-control and purposefulness, is a user illusion. We don’t have conscious control over ourselves at all. We just think we do.

Just because human beings went around thinking of themselves as “I” didn’t mean that it was true. And for all we knew, this damned swarm had some sort of rudimentary sense of itself as an entity. Or, if it didn’t, it might very soon start to.

“Forget it? He could have gotten us killed.” “And right now we have work to do.” I looked at her calm face, her steady expression. I thought of the swift way she had eviscerated the rabbit. “You’re right,” I said. “Good,” she said, turning away. “Now I think as soon as we get some backpacks, we’ll be ready to go.” There was a reason, I thought, why Mae never lost an argument.

“It looks like she was dragged out,” Bobby said. “Yes.” I peered closely at the secretion, looking for footprints. A coyote alone couldn’t have dragged her; a pack of animals would be needed to pull her out the door. They would surely leave marks. I saw none.

Close to the ground, moving right. I saw a flash of pale white. And almost immediately I knew that something was wrong. So did Bobby. He twisted his handlebars, moving his headlamp to point directly to the spot. He reached for binoculars. “That’s not an animal …” he said. Moving among the low bushes, we saw more white—flesh white. But we saw only glimpses. And then I saw a flat white surface that I realized with a shock was a human hand, dragging along the ground. A hand with outstretched fingers.

“Insects can execute plans that take longer than the lifespan of a single generation. They can build nests that require many generations. Isn’t that true?” “I think so …” “So maybe one swarm carried the body for a while, and then another took over. Maybe there have been three or four swarms so far. That way none of them has to go three hours at night.” I didn’t like the implications of that idea

I glanced at Mae, but she remained utterly still, a statue. Only her eyes moved. I squinted at the screen. Within the limits of video resolution, the two figures appeared to be identical in every respect. Same clothes, same movements, same gestures and shrugs. I couldn’t see the faces well, but I had the impression they were more detailed than before. They didn’t seem to notice the camera. They looked up at the sky, and then at the rock slide for a while, and then they turned their backs on us, and returned to the interior of the cave. Still Mae did not move. She had been motionless for almost a minute already and in that time she hadn’t even blinked. Now the men were gone, and— Another figure came around the corner. It was David Brooks.

the helicopter came back. The Ricky figure looked toward it as it came, and then turned and fled, literally flying over the ground, not bothering any longer to animate the legs and feet. It was creepy to see this human replica, suddenly floating over the desert. But the other three Ricky figures were running, too. Running hard, conveying a distinct sense of panic. Did the swarms fear the helicopter? It seemed they did. And as I watched, I understood why. Even though the swarms were now heavier and more substantial, they were still vulnerable to strong winds.

the swarms were gone. But in only a few moments, they began to reemerge. First one swarm, then three, then six, then ten—and then too many to count. They were converging, with an angry buzz, toward us. “How many caps have we got left?” I said. “Eight.” I knew then that we were not going to make it. We were too deep in the cave. We would never get out. I had no idea how many swarms were around us—my halogen beam swung back and forth across what seemed like an army. “Jack …” Mae said, holding out her hand. She never seemed to lose confidence. I lit three more caps and Mae threw them, retracing her steps toward the entrance as she did so. I stayed close to her, but I knew our situation was hopeless. Each blast scattered the swarms for just a moment. Then they quickly regrouped. There were far too many swarms.

With the helicopter still thumping above us, we clambered up the incline and collapsed over the lip of the mound, and tumbled down the slopes, out into the cool, black desert night. The last thing I saw was Mae waving the helicopter away, gesturing for it to go, go, go— And then the cave exploded.

maybe it was in his throat or something.”

I know Ricky could easily be lying here but haHA I KNEW IT!! I KNEW THEY COULD DO THAT!

“Why would Charley go in there?” I shook my head. I had no idea. Julia said, “It’s airtight. Maybe he knew he was infected and wanted to seal himself off. I mean, he locked the door from the inside.” I said, “He did? How do you know that?” Julia said, “Um … I just assumed … uh …”