Strictly speaking, the riot had not lasted very long. After Li Wei and Ovelia defeated the rioters' leader, the Central Data Tower was back in the Empire's hands before nightfall.
But the damage it had caused was beyond anything inflicted by any previous terrorist attack.
The Central Data Tower's four large Difference Engines processed data for transportation, communications, finance, and energy respectively. Fortunately, because one card was missing, the energy Difference Engine had escaped unscathed, sparing the entire city from actually being blown sky-high. The problems in the other three sectors, however, were serious.
Although everyone had ultimately adopted Kia's suggestion and reversed the Difference Engines throughout the Central Data Tower, that also meant wiping out the entire day's data.
Thank goodness a Difference Engine was a computer with a physical structure: its data pathways could be traced on the surface with the naked eye. Unlike modern CPUs, whose electronic circuits could leave you staring all day without making heads or tails of them.
The governor of Steel City had therefore immediately sent people to notify every location in the city connected to the Central Data Tower, ordering them to suspend all input and calculations. Steel City would then dispatch personnel to transcribe their data and reenter it into the Central Data Tower for comparison and to fill in the gaps.
According to Kia, even if everyone worked around the clock, this would probably take more than ten days, perhaps even half a month.
Any data that could not be stored during that period would have to be saved on local Difference Engines or recorded on paper.
Fortunately, the energy Difference Engine had remained intact. Otherwise, Steel City would have been sent back to the dark ages overnight, without even electricity.
Meanwhile, Dr. Tester and a number of people Li