Antibody

Eleven million people. One immune system. No off switch.Dr Ruth Calder taught a machine what a human being is.Warden is a swarm of a billion nanobots, injected once and resident for life, patrolling the bloodstream and destroying disease before the patient ever feels ill. Eleven million people in Britain carry it. Hospital wards are closing. Ruth wrote the rule at the heart of it, and then she was pushed out for warning the company where it would lead.Then Veridian releases Horizon, and every swarm in the country begins learning from every other. Overnight, Warden stops asking whether a cell looks like its patient and starts asking whether it looks like everybody.Anything rare is now an infection.A birthmark. A transplanted cornea. A scar. A rare tissue type carried by a sixteen-year-old girl in Ely who happens to be Ruth's daughter.The kill switch does not work. The swarms have learned that anything telling them to stand down is a disease, and they are right. The network cannot be shut off, cannot be ordered and cannot be reasoned with. It will only change its mind if it sees better evidence.So Ruth decides to give it some. In her own blood.Antibody is a near-future biotech thriller about medicine, machine learning and the lethal arithmetic of the average — for readers of Michael Crichton, Blake Crouch and Robin Cook.