Prey

Prey is a novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, first published in November 2002 and his thirteenth under his own name.

Jack Forman is a software engineer who loses his position and takes a job evaluating a start-up's claims, a task that turns out to mean trying to break a swarm of microscopic machines designed to act together the way a living organism does. The programme was built for medical work, and its design principles come from fields that include artificial life, emergence and genetic algorithms; it is also being manufactured in a facility whose management has stopped explaining what it is doing. When the project's safety record begins to include missing people, Forman has to work out how much of the swarm is outside the laboratory and what it has been able to teach itself in the meantime. The novel is a cautionary story about nanotechnology, genetic engineering and distributed intelligence.

Film rights were bought before the book appeared, though no film followed, and the novel was the first Crichton published in the twenty-first century.