PREY

I’ve read this book not once, not three times, not four, but just twice. Prey is a story which takes part in modern day time where Jack Forman has been relegated to being a househusband after being unfairly fired from his job at MediaTronics. He now stays home and takes care of the kids and is quite comfortable doing it. His wife, Julia, is the working one, working at a place called Xymos Technology. She is excited about the new products being developed there. The big achievement is that of a new kind of medical imaging which are suppose to be injected into the human body, each camera bit being no bigger than one-tenth of a billionth of an inch, smaller than microscopic dust. The science of producing such small pieces of machinery is called nanotechnology. The thousands of camera bits actually work together to produce an image due to an old program written by Jack, a program based on the swarming of bees, and “borrowed” now by Xymos to make their technology work.
But during the process of making this new technology Julia becomes a short-tempered, at times. She hardly ever comes home any more, working longer and longer hours. Jack is begins to worry that she might be having an affair. Their youngest child takes ill one day, developing a terrible rash that covers her entire body. The baby is howling and Jack believes she must be in pain. Julia is amazingly unconcerned.
The hospital performs many tests, but none seem to either help or explain the baby’s problem. But when she is taken for an MRI, she suddenly stops howling, and as suddenly, the rash clears up, leaving as fast as it came. What Jack doesn’t know then but will soon find out is that Amanda’s symptoms of illness were caused by a new kind of shared technological and biological creature, one that will very shortly threaten all of life on Earth.