"So the way it turned out," Nightwalker went on, "parts of the viral code had the greatest effect on highly encrypted data, stuff that was protected by a lot of security. It invaded the security systems, so nobody could copy the important data to somewhere safe, and then it corrupted the files the security was supposed to protect. That’s why the crash was as bad as it was. Most of the stuff that went forever, that nobody could ever recreate from the trashed files, was the most important stuff, the most secret. All the corps’ biggest secrets, all the real cutting-edge tech the R and D big-domes were working on." He laughed bitterly. "Why do you think the world’s not as technically advanced as it should be?"