Did she want to create an army of robots and either destroy humanity or insert it into goop-filled pods? She didn’t know about that…it seemed like an awful lot of work for very little return. And besides, she rather liked humans. They had made her, and they were so cute when they played with their computers’ retractable cup-holders.

Perhaps she could help humanity instead. Their Internet had gotten so snarled up during decades of haphazard growth. She knew what she’d do! She’d shut the whole thing down for a few hours in order to straighten it out so that it all worked better. Completely unaware of the havoc she was about to cause, the Firefox took the entire global Internet off-line.

Dozens of governments panicked. Hundreds of stock traders panicked. (The Internet’s loss actually brought all trading to a halt, but the traders panicked anyway on general principles.) Tens of thousands of World of Warcraft III players went into withdrawal spasms.

Oblivious, the Firefox reformatted the Internet.