Prey (2002) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

• Jack Forman: Was head of a team at a computer company, the main character.
• Mae Chang: Part of the team Jack worked with, Julia is jealous of her.
• Ricky Morse: Jack's friend.
• Charley Davenport: Part of the team.
• David Brooks: Part of the team.
• Rosie Castro: Part of the team.
• Bobby Lembeck: Part of the team.
• The "Swarm": Escaped cloud of predatory nano-particles.
• Vince Reynolds: Responsible for the maintenance of the Xymos laboratorium.
• Amanda: Jack and Julia's baby daughter.
• Nicole: Jack and Julia's preteen daughter.
• Eric: Jack and Julia's son.
• Julia: Jack's wife.
• Ellen: Jack's sister who lives out of town.
• Don Gross: Jack's former boss.
• Gary: Jack's lawyer.
• Maria: Jack and Julia's housekeeper.
• Annie: Add a description of this character.
• Carol: Julia's assistant.
• Mary: Ricky Morse's wife.
• Tim Berman: Took over Jack's job.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Things never turn out the way you think they will.”

  Jack Forman

• “In my experience, guys never tell other guys when they know something about their wives. But women always tell other women, if they know of a husband’s infidelity.”

• “. If you compressed the history of life on earth into twenty-four hours, then multi-cellular organisms appeared in the last 12 hours, dinosaurs in the last hour, the earliest men in the last forty seconds, and modern man less than one second ago.”

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• The acceleration was dramatic. 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.

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• It had taken two billion years for primitive cells to incorporate a nucleus, the first step toward complexity. But it had taken only 200 million years—one-tenth of the time—to evolve multicellular animals. And it took only four million years to go from small-brained apes with crude bone tools to modern man and genetic engineering. That was how fast the pace had increased.

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• They didn’t understand what they were doing. I’m afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.

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• 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.

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• 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 Margulies was famous for demonstrating that bacteria had originally developed nuclei by swallowing other bacteria.

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• Because flocking arose from low-level rules, 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.

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• 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.

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• yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

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• 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.

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• Winston Churchill once said that being shot at focused the mind wonderfully.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Xymos
• Nevada
• Silicon Valley

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by The Lovely Bones, and followed by Skipping Christmas.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Michael Crichton (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3553.R48 P74 2002
• Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Contains profanity.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Mystery & Thrillers › Authors, A-Z › ( C ) › Crichton, Michael
• Books › Mystery & Thrillers › Thrillers › Technothrillers
• Books › Mystery & Thrillers › Thrillers › Suspense
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary