DataKrash

The DataKrash is the event that divides the setting's cyberspace into a before and an after.

Before it, the Old NET was a vast global network. Dangerous, corporate and heavily defended — but connected.

After it, cyberspace became an archipelago of surviving networks separated from ruins that were no longer safe for humans to enter.

June 3, 2022

Rache Bartmoss had prepared the R.A.B.I.D.S. as a dead-man weapon. When they activated, they began breaching corporate systems and propagating through the Old NET.

The infection spread catastrophically. Cyberpunk sources place 78.2% of the Net under R.A.B.I.D.S. infection within months.

Traffic collapsed. Data was corrupted. Corporate systems failed. Artificial intelligences that had been contained inside military and corporate environments were released and changed in ways their creators could no longer control.

The Old NET became hostile terrain.

The part that matters to Soulkiller

R.A.B.I.D.S. were based on a twisted version of Soulkiller.

That does not make the DataKrash an Arasaka operation. It makes Soulkiller part of a much larger technological genealogy: code developed around the manipulation of human neural information was adapted by Bartmoss into autonomous offensive software, then released into the most connected system humanity had ever built.

The blast radius eventually reached almost everything.

What came after

The network was not simply repaired.

Corporations and governments retreated into smaller private networks, Data Pools and local NET Architectures. NetWatch eventually worked on a different answer: rather than cleaning every infected region, it would partition usable human cyberspace from the worst of what remained.

That answer became the Blackwall.