Jack puts together all the missing links. The corrosion of the memory chips in his home's electronics and Amanda's skin rash were caused by nanobot assemblers spread by infected-Julia. The MRI's strong magnetic field detached the assemblers from Amanda. Knowing this, Julia called in the Xymos special team to scan Amanda's room. The person whom Jack spotted in Julia's car was in fact the Ricky-swarm. Xymos had intentionally released the swarm into the desert so that it would evolve to stay in a cohesive group in the wind, but then they called him in to destroy the wild strain once it became uncontrollable.