so basically the world has technology to copy a dying person's consciousness, and ne of them happen to be duck. it seems like you can manually select which memories too to select. this happens to a person called duck. due to some circumstances, the AI stored based on duck's memory went rogue and slowly building its own power. it uses a blockchain and message board to hire runners to do their bidding until it suddenly found the orb messenger, that somehow are attracted to catherine.
at the same time, laura st. clare , a daughter of a prominent robot company came upon the same info, and it seems the orb is capable of some kind of interstellar travel, in which she wanted to use it as a medium to start a space mining colony. it is in fact, some kind of envoy to a christian based alien civilization to take the descendant of jesus christ (reminded me of gabriel knight 3, but the writer got inspired while doing all the drugs) back to their home among the stars.
one of the member of this civilization is pawpaw and his race is somehow immortal? meanwhile, the duck networks start taking control of some kind of antenna towers and blasting radiation in the swamp to create an organic neural network by mutating all the creatures in the swamp. at the same time, it uses catherine to get hold of the orb, the duck ate it but the information contained within it is too strong and start to kill the superduck. papaw used this as opportunity to complete his mission bringing jesus's descendant back to the stars. dunno why he killed john, since he's doing the same thing and i don't know the significance of the garett kept in the jar too. but in the end he almost succeeded, but kay were able to thwart his plan, escaped, and i am assuming the ship blew up.
the two plot of AI versus alien angels thing doesn't really merge well to me, and the resolution/explanation feel pretty rushed/forced. the idea and setting is great, and i can argue for a thematic coherence, the plot itself kinda fell apart in act 3, that it might need other explanation. who is million working for? st. clare spy to get the orb from catherine/kay? if so why did she went berserk when we found catherine's hardisk? why not do it after we found the orb?