Metafire

"I don't get it," said the Major.

"Neither do I," said Jack. "You know most copying by network proxy machines is automatic."

"Yes. But it is incredible to have coherent, and apparently complete, collections. The copying that happens automatically would leave whole bunches of fragments. They would be almost impossible to collect. Somebody was collecting everything each city had to offer, just before it blew up."

These aren't cities that attract a huge amount of Internet attention. Somebody was interested in the 'before and after' shot. I think they wanted to keep the 'before' alive in cyberspace. Maybe some kind of perverted power thing." Jill had more to say, but she held back. Clearly these guys were not going to believe her. She knew they wouldn't, but the Major had asked.

Jack couldn't hold himself in. "Major, I'm sorry, but I just joined the staff this morning. I have to ask a question."

"Don't let me stop you," the Major smiled.

"First, web crawlers could have kept records that watchful operators could have kept." Web crawlers, or "spiders," had been in use for years creating complete, if temporary copies, of regions on the net.