Prey

He takes out a lighter as he talks with Julia, who keeps asking where Mae is. The men walk in circles around him. Jack holds the lighter up to a sprinkler, but nothing happens. Julia says Ricky turned the sprinklers off as they grab Jack and hold him down. Then the assembly line overheats, and the glass tubes start exploding; because Ricky turned the safety system off, it is now spreading the virus that has been reproducing this whole time. Julia screams that she hates Jack as the sprinklers come on. They scream when the water touches them.

Jack and Mae board the helicopter, and the pilot flies them away from the lab. Mae says she escaped and was in the shed looking for more thermite. There is a massive explosion behind them. 

Jack returns home and nurses his sick children after he purposefully gives them the virus that will protect them from the particles. He realizes as he holds Amanda that her rash was from the molecule assemblers, which were transmitted from Julia’s clothes; she had been showering every night because she thought her clothes might be contaminated, a new behavior he had believed was evidence of an affair. The invisible particles were biting Amanda until she got into the MRI machine. When he remembers the white van and the men in the gas masks, he understands that the “vacuum men” Eric had seen were the cleanup crew. They had also left the sensor under Amanda’s crib. Now, instead of thinking that another man had been in the car with Julia, Jack thinks it was a swarm.

The desert lab was destroyed; there were no bodies or even bones. Jack’s ears ring constantly, and he wonders if he is paranoid. He realizes that the swarms always returned to the lab because they’d been programmed that way. He finds an email from Ricky to Julia that reveals they had been planning to release a swarm into the environment. It was intentional; they hoped that the swarm would evolve and solve the wind problem on its own. Jack is devastated by his losses, but he knows that Julia and Ricky were simply acting according to human nature. He worries that humanity will never learn from its mistakes.