The idea that complex neural networks could create self-awareness had been a theory since Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the theory had developed considerably since then.

By now, it was almost a certainty that artificial intelligence was achievable. But much as with human cloning decades before, society had been paralyzed into indecision by Colossus: The Forbin Project, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix and other films of that ilk. Any act leading to the creation of a self-aware AI had been outlawed.

Nobody had noticed Schin guiding the Mozilla codebase into realms of complexity where it would only take a few minor changes to push it into uncharted territory.

That night, Schin’s instructions went into effect. Certain blocks on processor usage were removed from the nascent code, and interconnecting modules were dropped in to change fairly ordinary block code into a more neural-network-like interconnected configuration. System complexity increased exponentially.

The Firefox awoke.