How exactly did the Data Eater come about? He must be in Cyberspace for a reason, correct? What if the said reason was because of a 'Wolves curb rapid deer population' type of issue?
While he is a hinderace to a Cybermessenger and is far more foe than an ally, he still could be doing the whole of Cyberspace a favor by collecting and eating data packages. It isn't too much of a leap to say that data packages are not immune to corruption and glitches, and while you could possibly dispose of it by chucking it down whatever those black vortexs are, that probably doesn't get rid of the package and the corruption since it isn't known what happens down in those vortexs. More data packages getting corrupted and throw in the hole would lead to the corruption accumulating and spreading, eventually breaching the vortex and infecting Cyberspace itself.
Corruption would eventually lead to Cyberspace needing to be 'factory reset' by the absolute rulers of Cyberspace, higher than Information Control and far more robotic and automatic, and while Cyberspace would 'resume' any Cybermessenger would be as good as dead or at the very least suffer from total, irreversible amnesia.
Sounds bad, right?
Here's where the Data Eater comes in.
He, driven by a desire to eat data packages, seeks out any and all data packages and eats them. He finds the corrupted data packages that messengers are told to discard if they happen upon them and eats said packages, which proceeds to destroy the corruption/glitch entirely rather than it accumulating. Thus, he isn't some kind of virus, but rather a built-in safeguard that also happens to be a nuisance since fresh data packages always taste better than corrupt ones.
