Datavore

A datavore was a creature with the ability to ingest information like food, essentially feeding on knowledge.
The Seventh Doctor speculated that the Process was a datavore when, in its attack on his ship, it ate the TARDIS manual and left other books unharmed. It also later fed on the mental energy of the Time Scaphe crew. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) AM!xitsa, a drone and member of the People, had an internal datavore trap where it had discarded 6,547 unpublished theses. When Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart attacked AM!xitsa and it struck a tree, the datavore regurgitated all theses. (PROSE: The Also People)
Krllxk was an inorganic but self-aware datavore artificially created on a research station for data-collection. Rebelling against its creators, it escaped containment and took control of a ship, eventually coming across the Sixth Doctor, who destroyed it before it could consume the TARDIS databanks. (PROSE: Time of Your Life)
Virtual datavores served as the "anti-virus" system of the Cyberons' Cybernet, literally devouring hostile code. They were also capable of making rudimentary repairs to the structure of the Cybernet as necessary. Within the virtual-reality projection of the Cybernet experienced by Emily and Christian when they downloaded themselves into it, they appeared as "half-shark, half-Cyberon". Christian managed to survive being eaten by a datavore by dividing his consciousness in two, only allowing the shark access to one half, which contained an anti-datavore datavore he'd captured. As it digested this half, the datavore quickly found itself eaten out from the inside by the anti-datavore datavore, allowing the surviving part of Christian to climb out of it unscathed. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)
Category:Parasitic species
Category:Taxonomies
Category:Computer viruses