Persuaded by Jack, the team decides to destroy the swarm, fearing a grey goo plague that could endanger humanity. Jack is attacked by the swarms, and barely manages to get through the airlock into the lab before falling unconscious from anaphylactic shock. The nanoswarm kills a rabbit outside the complex, and Jack goes outside with Mae to inspect they find that the rabbit died of suffocation, as the nanobots blocked its bronchial tubes. The swarms wander around the plant during the day, but leave when strong winds blow or night falls. Jack also learns that Julia helped make the swarms more benign, but they regressed when she left. Most alarmingly, the swarm possess rudimentary intelligence, the ability to quickly learn and innovate. The swarms exhibit predatory behavior, killing animals in the wild, using code that Jack himself worked on. These swarms appear to be clouds of solar-powered self-sufficient nanobots, reproducing and evolving ( necroevolution) rapidly. Ricky later claims that contractors improperly installed filters in a vent, which caused assemblers, bacteria, and nanobots to be blown into the desert, evolving and forming autonomous swarms. Jack is taken to the Xymos research facility in Nevada's Basin Desert, where he is given a tour of the lab, meets the programming team, and is shown a machine used to make the nanobot assemblers from bacteria, though Ricky refuses to show the source code for the nanobots. Julia is injured in a car crash, and Jack is recruited to consult at Xymos, as the project manager, Ricky, is having issues with the nanobots. Strange events lead Jack to suspect something bigger is going on: their son Eric claims he saw "silver men" cleaning the house in the middle of the night, Jack finds a strange device underneath Amanda's bed, memory chips on their son's MP3 player turn to dust, and Julia becomes abusive to her family as well as seen driving with an unidentifiable passenger. Bewildered, Jack returns home to a strangely indifferent Julia who leaves in a hurry, claiming to go on an urgent business trip. She is given an MRI, and suddenly her pain stops and the skin changes disappear. Jack takes her to the hospital, but the doctors cannot identify the cause of her pain. Later in the night, their baby Amanda awakens in agony as her body turns red. Jack is impressed, but becomes more suspicious when he notices the video was not made on the day she claimed. One night, Julia shows Jack a video of the Xymos nanobots being put into a human test subject. She grows distant to Jack and her family, and he believes she is having an affair. His wife Julia serves as a high ranking executive at a nanorobotics company called Xymos and claims to be working on a new revolutionary imaging technology, which takes up most of her time. The novel is narrated by the protagonist Jack Forman, an unemployed software programmer taking the role of a house husband. ( April 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed.
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