Hardware technical difficulties experienced at the end of the game (spoilers)

[Abion47]

It's not clear what specifically happened at the end of the game since, well, it's the end of the game. My theory is that Catherine's emotional outburst, similar to what happened to Brandon during the Theta simulations, drew too much power from the Omnitool, causing the cortex chip to short out. While I feel like this sort of damage to the chip is 100% repairable, I doubt that Simon has the knowledge required to pull it off, so he is just left with an Omnitool and a functioning tool chip, but no working cortex chip.