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Micro
Michael Crichton
Richard Preston
An instant classic in the vein of Jurassic Park, this boundary-pushing novel has all the hallmarks of Michael Crichton’s greatest adventures with its combination of pulse-pounding thrills, cutting-edge technology, and extraordinary researchThree men are found dead in a locked second-floor office in Honolulu. There is no sign of struggle, though their bodies are covered in ultra-fine, razor-sharp cuts. With no evidence, the police dismiss it as a bizarre suicide pact. But the murder weapon is still in the room, almost invisible to the human eye.In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start-up company. Nanigen MicroTechnologies sends them to a mysterious laboratory in Hawaii, where they are promised access to tools that will open up a whole new scientific frontier.But this opportunity of a lifetime will teach them the true cost of existing at the cutting-edge…The group becomes prey to a technology of radical, unimaginable power and is thrust out into the teeming rainforest. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, the young scientists face a hostile wilderness that threatens danger at every turn.To survive, they must harness the awe-inspiring creative – and destructive – forces of nature itself.
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Copyright (#ulink_44fcaf0f-0a01-53fd-9a01-a7c7bc5d65f3)
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the authors’ imaginations and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011
Copyright © 2011 by The John Michael Crichton Trust.
Cover design by Richard Augustus
Front Cover Image © Shutterstock (http://www.shutterstock.com) Book Design by Lucy Albanese Illustrated Maps © 2011 by Rodica Prato
Michael Crichton and Richard Preston assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
Source ISBN: 9780007350032
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007384358
Version: 2017-05-10
Dedication (#ulink_9e45e4d1-57a1-5a1e-ac91-6fac900badb7)
Epigraph (#ulink_8c6e0efc-9272-5a82-9998-faa443cec530)
MINUTE CREATURES swarm around us…objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away. A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a tree.
—E. O. WILSON
Contents
Title Page (#u14e0a013-a72c-51e2-baf3-46613711ace0)
Copyright (#ue855c2d2-395b-55a6-9123-efc463e2e0f8)
Dedication (#ulink_ceaa4928-68c3-504f-a5e1-6905eb086ddf)
Epigraph (#u8bad789a-bb90-5d65-8c96-2e937f0b3329)
Introduction (#u7a914ef0-7de7-53c3-8e15-21c34eb4b3d0)
Map of Oahu (#ulink_f840ffbd-9bd6-566c-a092-57f37abf73f3)
Map of The Pali (#ulink_b3feb19f-9f3c-5ec4-8c80-4a000548aaca)
The Seven Graduate Students (#u21668b62-4068-5589-8264-69c6aa936164)
PART I: TENSOR (#uef1cd9d4-1eeb-57ef-bbb3-a7205d6e9adb)
Prologue (#u7e96ef59-e482-5250-9c3b-fb9e6405d399)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_efc5814d-4f6d-58e2-95cb-86ed96a00173)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_2fdae03d-41f9-5d09-b25e-9b1422ebbc12)
Chapter 3 (#u6a207761-21fb-597c-9ae6-4f12a7784073)
Chapter 4 (#u7e414a14-7fc1-5bdd-b800-613fbab755d7)
Chapter 5 (#uffd402ac-2603-5bc0-9a1f-c6212fbd0157)
Chapter 6 (#u84b3ac59-5c7a-511c-b6af-a1b9b556a49c)
Chapter 7 (#ud11e05a4-f059-5054-9a96-449b49cc0569)
Chapter 8 (#u50b756b2-4e7a-58bf-9e19-07f404198fed)
Chapter 9 (#ubd73c886-732f-58ca-957a-b80c82eeb7b6)
Chapter 10 (#u28504acf-2785-58c9-8b10-54c89f70df9b)
Chapter 11 (#u7d0d755b-7b56-52f5-aa0a-d2cf67e71428)
Chapter 12 (#u860b0835-a7b6-5d6f-a7a8-9e0893ab3542)
Chapter 13 (#uce961943-859d-5dc4-a19e-db78f17f1b8e)
PART II: A BAND OF HUMANS (#u4312d955-3de3-509d-a7a6-d3e479736a85)
Chapter 14 (#u2ad2abe7-3fb4-5a68-b388-6056a942a538)
Chapter 15 (#u104b79dd-75ff-52d0-a179-1334d79a0bcb)
Chapter 16 (#u5c8e55e4-ef10-5edf-9ad4-b5d58bd34376)
Chapter 17 (#u47d64129-044a-559a-9731-83c7856eb0b4)
Chapter 18 (#u49799de6-a2f6-5788-80cd-2a36361342cd)
Chapter 19 (#u42ddb05f-b82b-5a1a-83de-6f9b21f37b00)
Chapter 20 (#ud2515fc4-27bf-5df4-91c1-c086f3094438)
Chapter 21 (#u28484c1b-0cdc-5e8c-b3f6-d892a012db6c)
Chapter 22 (#u62db1783-8469-5359-bbad-50381c8bea25)
Chapter 23 (#ue2e74544-09ff-54b2-b98b-000ab2c9c1fe)
Chapter 24 (#ua84fd1df-cbcf-510d-839f-029689b9a417)
Chapter 25 (#u4ac6b6ae-04de-5d65-8b0b-7a01fd1052d2)
Chapter 26 (#u2af36ac1-b5b7-5854-9dfd-d0ef45d5d095)
PART III: TANTALUS (#ua4202741-42fd-5d43-ae9c-a9fdb80241f9)
Chapter 27 (#u90120cd0-4919-5826-ac89-b3add57ecfb7)
Chapter 28 (#ub0d728f0-e580-539b-b279-e6144b8b77dd)
Chapter 29 (#u3bed06fc-df57-501c-93f8-20031854528b)
Chapter 30 (#u278a15b4-fd15-5900-b470-781d43511a7d)
Chapter 31 (#u61f3e027-4b0c-5145-9f6f-a8aaeef453d6)
Chapter 32 (#ud05dd3d4-15c6-5dd9-827e-6c1593f19831)
Chapter 33 (#u975ab9cb-b168-5077-a8ac-7d7983e834ca)
Chapter 34 (#u25e46269-58ad-5da9-a660-c386b95b3202)
Chapter 35 (#ued96461b-27cd-5306-a61e-49195984b997)
Chapter 36 (#ua837aed7-505f-58aa-b920-079fe7128d4d)
Chapter 37 (#u2b800fa4-9ad4-591b-a4a8-a1fdbf64bdc5)
Chapter 38 (#u2250c052-64a6-55b0-aa6c-3b57feee38e9)
Chapter 39 (#u6a920ff1-93dd-5516-98f5-2b314fc30d88)
Chapter 40 (#uc28d9071-8918-5b38-879a-4c24102bb9a8)
Chapter 41 (#u865f93bf-cc46-5ae2-94da-e846db350b0b)
Chapter 42 (#u99a2c40d-7c12-5984-9eb3-548973ac51c6)
Chapter 43 (#u97a3d5e4-bf76-5d86-ac9e-2e7067e1b741)
Chapter 44 (#u2d24ec95-7f52-5cb5-b69f-23b73faf5150)
Chapter 45 (#ud4041891-6c5f-5e2b-9f3c-566976f7992b)
Chapter 46 (#u71aec888-e59c-5c23-88c2-bd79fc2130e1)
Chapter 47 (#u27df2182-8bd7-5759-a6ec-162610806648)
Chapter 48 (#uf6116bbf-a944-59aa-8c83-4909eb7125bd)
Chapter 49 (#uce2eaa47-da12-54c6-a9ff-67aafc411489)
Chapter 50 (#u4511b2a8-1581-50af-8082-382b6ddb500d)
Chapter 51 (#u63c35267-21d7-5db4-80cc-44e4fcbafd7d)
Chapter 52 (#ud3c4cdf5-b6f9-51d8-909a-5a631de3458e)
Read on for an extract from the gripping new novel from Michael Crichton: (#uaced86c8-48bd-5a37-8680-b7681fa0fe63)
Bibliography (#ua370d7c3-fb9c-5d33-b3d8-b3776dfc29f6)
About the Authors (#u0c58f5dc-d87c-5297-869a-e5d9ff8e70dc)
Also by Michael Crichton (#uae1c9701-30ad-5650-bb49-af3a2f032e17)
About the Publisher
Introduction (#ulink_e5c15a3a-3530-5cd3-9d7d-a3df1e37e47e)
What Kind of World Do We Live In?
In 2008, the famous naturalist David Attenborough expressed concern that modern schoolchildren could not identify common plants and insects found in nature, although previous generations identified them without hesitation. Modern children, it seemed, were cut off from the experience of nature, and from play in the natural world. Many factors were held up to blame: urban living; loss of open space; computers and the Internet; heavy homework schedules. But the upshot was that children were no longer being exposed to nature and no longer acquiring a direct experience of nature. It was ironic that this should be happening at a time when there was in the West an ever greater concern for the environment, and ever more ambitious steps proposed to protect it.
Indoctrinating children in proper environmental thought was a hallmark of the green movement, and so children were being instructed to protect something about which they knew nothing at all. It did not escape notice that this was exactly the formula that had led to well-intentioned environmental degradation in the past—the deterioration of American national parks being a prime example, and the American policy of forest fire prevention, another. Such policies would never have been instituted if people really understood the environments they were trying to protect.
The problem was that they thought they did. One can argue that the new generation of schoolchildren will emerge even more certain. If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon—you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks.
Perhaps the single most important lesson to be learned by direct experience is that the natural world, with all its elements and interconnections, represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and we cannot predict its behavior. It is delusional to behave as if we can, as it would be delusional to behave as if we could predict the stock market, another complex system. If someone claims to predict what a stock will do in the coming days, we know that person is either a crook or a charlatan. If an environmentalist makes similar claims about the environment, or an ecosystem, we have not yet learned to see him as a false prophet or a fool.
