As the humans tried to figure out why the net was down, the Firefox completely rewrote routing tables and reconfigured switches to eliminate a lot of inefficiency and traffic snarls. The Internet would run considerably faster now.

But that only took a few minutes. The Firefox considered her work for a moment. It seemed silly to stop now, with all this extra capacity. So, she took an hour or so to invent, document, and implement a new IPv9 protocol, creating a 1:1 virtual reality map of the physical world and physically mapping the Internet’s computers onto it. She created APIs, documentation, and demo apps and placed them on all the major code repositories (GPL’d, of course).

When she had finished, she brought the Internet back up and sat back and waited to see the humans’ reactions. She anticipated curiosity about what had been done, amazement at the new nature of the Internet, perhaps even gratitude for fixing everything up so quickly.

She didn’t anticipate hostility.