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Dominador Awiten .

IN a Facebook meme, there is this dark conversation:

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Crystal ball gazer (finger-pointing at a point in the ball): Your husband will meet a violent end.

Woman customer (astonished): Will I be convicted?

It is invariably a criminal person’s wish not to be found out.

When an astute criminal investigator arrives at the scene of the crime, they are particularly expecting the perpetrator to be among the early kibitzers.  (This is a familiar scene in a movie.)

Suspicion is presumed from relationship or familiarity with the victim.  The motivation is often rent-seeking.

A murder plot is more sinister and baleful when there is an accompanying infidelity of the spouse.

That possibility brings to mind Michael Crichton’s intensely terrifying techno-thriller Prey

It is a novel with elements of computer technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology mixed in as ingredients in a finely but firmly meshed combination to produce a weapon of predation.

Like his other thrillers, Crichton was able to explain his real-world fear of science and technology going berserk. In Crichton’s universe, science really becomes bad when exploited by bad people.

In Prey, the protagonist is a computer programmer who loses his job when he decides not to be coopted in a corrupt scheme. While he bides his time as a househusband to take care of their three young children, his wife gets promoted in her job at the techno firm that has earlier let go of the husband.

Later, he observes quirks in her behavior like coming home late, taking showers on arrival, looking more beautiful, more attractive. Without a doubt, they signify of the wife having an affair.

The parallel narrative of infidelity brings pathos in to the main story of tiny (nano) robots multiplying, learning, and evolving to bring havoc to the surrounding in which they are introduced.

The husband is reemployed as a consultant to help deal with problems concerning the nano robots.

At the end, the husband has to fight for his survival and for the survival of his young children by vanquishing the nanorobots that his computer program has enabled to flourish, and by defending his well-being and his life from the combined attack of his wife and her lover.

The protagonist thinks, in conclusion, it is a stupidity for science to embark on the nanorobot production and dissemination, for the resulting swarm will become more intelligent, and eventually, they will be autonomous.

It is damning stupidity, too, for the wife to sacrifice her family for her overweening ambition.

I remember the movie Unfaithful (2002) with the housewife being wooed by her young lover with the alluring lines of a Persian verse: “Be happy for this moment, this moment is your life.”

The ending is different, though.  The husband finds out about the illicit affair when he hires a private investigator. He goes to the lover’s abode and, after a revelatory  conversation, kills him by banging the head with a Christmas décor snow globe that the husband has gifted his wife and which, he realizes, the wife has gifted her lover.

But, in a certain way, both are quite similar, in that the unfaithfulness destroys – in Prey, the cohesion of the family, and in Unfaithful, the couple’s moral integrity.

American fiction writer Jaime Quatro gives us examples of motivation of writing about a wayward married person:

First, love seems to undergird the relationship, despite the infidelity. Marriage may dissolve, but the couple’s affection for each other remains.

A husband may accept his wife’s passionate affair with another man, considering that she is about to die from a terminal illness.

Thirty years after the one-night affair with a near-stranger, the wife is vexed as to whether to admit or deny the shameful event.

The narrative may implicate the reader who recognizes his or her participation in the story; there may arise in the reader a “psychic fury.”

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