***In a way…you’re going to help defend the Net…Johnny, bad things are happening there. The Central Entity needs the Net…think of it as a nursery, a breeding ground for your brothers and sisters…all angels. They’ve come from a long way and they need the Net to do their job***
But the Net is just a network of computers…links…software….
Now, the Doc Frost image turned stern, its eyes narrowing and the corners of its mouth turning down. ***Johnny, there are grave threats to the Prime Key, coming from the Net, coming from the node where you will be sent…you’re needed to defend this node…many of your brothers and sisters are themselves on a special mission…it’s a mission to the Sun…***
Johnny Winger listened carefully to what Doc Frost was saying. He knew the Prime Key was the master algorithm. It drove everything. He readily agreed to what Doc Frost…or what he imagined was Doc Frost…was saying. How could he not? That’s what it meant to be an angel…the greater good drove everything.
But this seemed different. Though he was compelled to follow Doc Frost’s directives…no angel could say no…he knew there was another mission, unspoken of by Doc Frost. He wanted to link up with Doc III but he was afraid the link would be discovered.
He was here to serve the mother swarm but a small part of him understood that the other mission was just as vital…to learn what he could about the Old Ones, gather intelligence and somehow get that intelligence to the Normals…so the blasted thing could be defeated.
It was a struggle between the two missions…serving the mother swarm and gathering intelligence needed to defeat that very same mother swarm. Espionage was like that. Mata Hari and all that. Serving two masters. Slicing yourself ever more finely to feed the appetites of two worlds, hoping and praying that the two worlds would never meet and annihilate each other, like particle and anti-particle.
Somehow, Doc III had been able to deconstruct him and allow him to be absorbed into the Keeper, yet preserve the essence of what he was, his identity, his memories. Now it was coming back to him…maybe Doc III was letting him draw on that innocuous little file where his memory patterns had been stored.
The basic objective of defeating the Keeper and ultimately the Old Ones was still there, still intact, though he knew now it would be in constant danger from competing directives from the mother swarm. Directives inherent in the program that was now running in his head…in his body…in his everything.
Which side would win out? Even Johnny Winger couldn’t answer that. Execute the Prime Key. Smash the bejeezus out of the Prime Key. Those were his options. There was no middle ground. But somehow, he had to find a way.
He felt himself moving, moving physically. It brought back a memory…riding the Wicked Witch on the boardwalk at Daytona. Jerks and rolls and snap turns…his neck had been sore for hours. Or maybe it was like when he got to ride in a real race car at Talladega…some kind of Fans Day on the speedway and you just about threw up the fences were flashing by so fast.
No, that wasn’t quite it either. This was different. But he decided to relax and let this odd sense of motion come to him…what else could you do? When a pitcher threw a baseball, the atoms that made up the baseball didn’t have a debate about where to go.
The entity that had once been known as Johnny Winger would be traveling back to Earth, as part of a greater swarm. The entity rode an artificial geyser off the surface of Europa and began a journey that would take only a few hours. Though the distance from Jupiter to Earth was some five hundred million kilometers, the trip would only take the Winger entity a few hours. When you were an angel, you could do things like that. More to the point, the Keeper had been directed to transmit his unique patterns to a master bot closer to Earth. The transmission would imprint and download those patterns to the new bot and a new angel body would be replicated. Johnny Winger would take form again, looking almost like the original.
Almost.
As the Winger entity left Europa and departed Jupiter, impressed on a carrier wave that would take his patterns Earthward, he detected that the small, cracked-billiard-ball of a world that had once been called Europa was now a huge ball of light.
The Keeper was disassembling the satellite, per directives from the Central Entity, disassembling the satellite into feedstock for later use by the mother swarm.
Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary Page 55