Krishna
We have reviewed Congo and The Lost World earlier by the same author. Michael writes stories based on real science as a background but his stories are always adventure thrillers. This book is no different.
The narrator Jack Forman is a homemaker. His wife Julia works as a VP in a nanotechnology firm and is working late as she is trying to raise a round of funds with the Venture Capitalists.
He himself was a VP in a company and when he tried to expose pervasive corruption to one of the board members (who was also on the take) he got fired for his pains and found that he could not even get another job anywhere. So he stayed home (stay-at-home dad) waiting for it to blow over, so that he can find another job.
Meanwhile Julia comes home and because of tiredness or another reason seems to be very irritable. She bosses over her kids and bites Jack’s head off when he tries to reason with her. He is very puzzled over the changes that have come over Julia.
He sees how the nanotechnology swarm can intelligently penetrate the human body (via injections) and show what is inside the body. You get reminded of older science fiction where a spaceship with people was shrunk enough to enter a human body but here, it is based on plausible science.
He learns that the invention is of a swarm of nanoparticles small enough to be injected into the body but which work as a network, communicating, obeying commands and doing useful reparative work inside the body.
When Julia comes home late after promising to come early, he is angry. However, his nine month old daughter Amanda develops a rash that seems to spread rapidly and he takes her to the hospital. After giving all the experts there a massive puzzle, the rash abruptly recedes and disappears in a very short time.
He sees a man in the car with his wife and his wife is really behaving strangely. But when she gets into an accident, he rushes to her for help. Not understanding what is going on, he accepts the offer of the job to work in her wife’s company as a representative of his previous company – as a consultant. His only motive was to figure out what is going on because the person who was there with her seems not to have been there when the car went over. None of this makes sense.
Intrigued, Jack decides to take the job so that he could go to Julia’s company and investigate the mystery himself.
A little diversion here : Michael gets the technical details right. Though his technical descriptions are not very deep, he talks accurately about network distributed programming and other concepts – even about the inside Joke of the Unix world : ‘Obey me I am Root’. Nice to see the accuracy from a popular thriller writer.
When he reaches the place, he realizes that some of the microbes they were building for the army escaped. He sees a triple swarm appear outside the perimeter, trying to get in. When they attack and kill a rabbit, he gets concerned. They tell him that contrary to expectations, they not only thrive when the sun is down – they are powered by solar power – but have found a way to reproduce and multiply. They also seem to have evolved independent thinking, which, in theory, should not be possible for a programmed being.
He decided to see the rabbit that was attacked and goes with Mae, a surgeon. She cuts the rabbit open and takes the blood (and also, surreptitiously some of the black particles found in its esophagus). When she leaves to get some more implements, Jack is attacked and almost killed by the swarm which returns. He escapes just in time but before that he is amazed at finding that the swarm displays far greater intelligence than what he remembers programming. This is vintage Chrichton and the tension builds up as he is trapped between two swarms with apparently no way to escape them!
He is rescued and recovers from a bad case of poisoning. He learns that the swarms that were let out were several tons over a long period and that they are reproducing and evolving learning behaviours and they are adapting and improving really fast.
When four of them go to the garage to get a radioactive isotope to mark the swarm and find it when it is at rest in the night, they also visit the dead rabbit and find that the rabbit has actually been eaten by the swarm for sustenance and reproduction. They dally a bit too much in the garage collecting stuff but find themselves trapped with the swarm outside! Meanwhile Charlie behaves as if he does not want them to succeed and on top, he is inexplicably ripped – he is not the working out type. Strange.
The story has much more tension than the above bland telling. The microbes seem to be evolving into a sophisticated, aware swarm at astonishing speed. They have learnt to hunt and use the nutrients to divide and reproduce other beings with similar swarm intelligence. They almost seem invincible.
There is a great scene where the swarm traps them all inside the garage and they cleverly imitate swarm behaviour to fool them. However, one of them panics, runs and is instantly attacked and killed in a really fascinating way. A lady who was with them falls and is also attacked. Now with just three of them, Jack knows that he should now make a run for it.
Fascinating, thrilling stuff – like most of Chrichton’s books. It is interesting that here the enemy is a very small particle but in a huge swarm with combined intelligence.
They get out and are immediately confronted by swarms. They take refuge in two cars. Mae and Jack manage to get in but Jack is manipulated to going back for his colleague by Charlie who seems to have his own reasons for Jack not to succeed. Jack manages to rescue Chris and come back, using a scooter and after a terrifying moment of attacks by the nanoparticles who seem to have capabilities much wider than what Jack had programmed all those years ago. So someone is lying to him about what they created and what is more, not allowing him to see the latest code to figure it out.
That night, they realize that they need to reach and disable the particles when they are out of charge and go in pursuit of it. There is a chilling scene where the dead body of their colleague Karen is being dragged into a termite-like mound that the nanoparticles have managed to build. They had earlier sprayed one of the swarms with a material that will help them track with an instrument they have. They find out chillingly that not only the nanoparticles have managed to extend the solar light to help them thrive (after a fashion) in the dark – thereby making their job of eliminating them when they are lying inert as they imagined harder, but also evolving collaborative behaviour far more sophisticated than they were (supposedly programmed and) imagined.
There is also a chilling scene where the particles have managed to reconstruct a 3 D holographic image of Chirs, right down to his T shirt.
Eerie and nice imagination for which Michael, known for imagining The Jurassic Park, is well known.
It gets better. Jack, Chris and Mae go hunting for the particles and find them in a custom built cave like ‘structure’. Inside the structure they meet three Chris like figures, all of them walking and behaving like original Chris. But however, they turn into the recently deceased Karen sometimes, even though Karen walks like Chris did – they have not perfected the art of imitation.
When Jack thinks that he is almost caught, he is saved by a helicopter’s wind as these cannot still stand strong draughts of wind as from the helicopter’s rotors. A fabulously tense scene ensues where they manage to destroy the central factory of these creatures (also made of organic materials!) and barely escape with their lives.
Julia is back from the hospital and is behaving oddly, discomfiting Jack by her strange behaviour.
On the tape, they witness an amazing scene where Julia traps Charley and spews dark clouds into him, killing him – it is a near kiss. Earlier they also see Julia and xxx kissing. Now they realize that somehow they have got the nanoparticles inside them and somehow are living on instead of being killed. Now he also realizes that he and Mae are in mortal danger since they already suspect that they know too much.
The last fifty pages are non stop thrill. The descriptions get better and better and when you realize what happened to the trio Julia, Charlie and Vince, it is enough to make you gasp in shock. Jack and Mae are fighting against all odds and the plan that Jack comes up with is simply brilliant and also desperate in its low chances of success.
The final confrontation if Jack with the trio – with Mae having been disabled – is brilliant and you definitely cannot put the book down – if ever you could – once you start into that part.
Later, a full explanation of what happened is given, at the end of the book – not at the epilog, but it may as well have been an epilog. This is fiction but based on scientific frontiers of knowledge and with real possibilities of how cutting edge science can go horribly wrong if safety processes were not adopted properly.
A brilliant book based on science with a thriller element in the story and dialog thrown in. Brilliant.
8/10