Prey

Jack wakes in the residence area. After taking a shower, he talks with Ricky. Jack is furious that Ricky didn’t help him. He notes that Ricky is acting bizarrely, smiling foolishly and assuring Jack that he values their friendship. Trying to determine how long Ricky has known about the swarm’s dangerous capabilities, Jack asks about the PR representatives on the helicopter he took here, who have clearly been summoned to solve a PR crisis. Ricky denies knowing what he’s talking about. Thirty minutes later, he brings Ricky the missing code from the “compstat” section. The code has only minor changes from the original, so Jack can’t account for the emergent behavior. Pondering their situation, he compares the nature of parasites to the structures of certain genetic programs. He contemplates the obsolete idea of survival of the fittest, which does not account for the fact that weaker organisms eventually grow stronger and strike back at predators. He thinks, “Parasitism and symbiosis were the true basis for evolutionary change” (251). Jack knows that Ricky understands all this as well and should have seen the danger coming, meaning either he or Julia ignored the probability of the particles self-organizing. He calls home and talks to Nicole, who complains about Eric and Ellen.