Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

  ***General, you are still not fully regenerated from the HERF rounds…you have casing damage and your pyridine probes and enzymatic knife are currently inoperable…recommending some downtime so that repairs can be affected…I will need feedstock to do this…***

  Winger felt torn. Doc III was right; he did need a little patching up. But there was so much that he had to do, so much he had to learn. Somehow, he had to make the Normals…no, that wasn’t quite right…he couldn’t think of them as different from himself, he was one of them…wasn’t he? But somehow, he had to make Argo and UNSAC and the rest of them realize they had an agent inside the enemy swarms. He needed to set up a channel to funnel that intelligence back to Quantum Corps and UNIFORCE.

  And he had to find a way to sabotage what Symborg and Config Zero were already doing. Which meant he had to understand better how they worked.

  So, more reconnaissance was needed. And the best way to get around and do that was to use the Net.

  Johnny Winger enabled config C-3308 and started de-materializing, breaking himself down into the constituent bots that made up the angel.

  “You know, Doc, you’re right. Loose config is better. You just set the right parameters and off you go, just like the wind. Riding the Net is better than any subway system.”

  The Johnny Winger angel was soon invisible to the human eye, an amorphous swarm of nanoscale bots drifting like dust motes, drifting toward one of the still functioning ports on a server rack inside Bank Eight. The swarm located the node and transited the connector pin grid as easily as a Normal walked through a door.

  Only this door led directly to the WorldNet.

  Now circulating inside the Net, the pattern of bots that had once been called Johnny Winger made a decision. A search algorithm was executed, which would allow it to hunt down a compatible pattern, a pattern that it was certain existed somewhere. Uncountable yottabytes of data would have to be systematically searched, files compared, results tabulated.

  Johnny Winger was looking for Dana Tallant.

  Jeez, it’s like searching for a penny in the Pacific. Doc, how the hell do I do this?