The Firefox was confused. She’d only been trying to help—but the world was in an uproar over the outage, and the changes that had followed. The United States and China were accusing each other of cyber-terrorism. Other major powers such as Britain and Russia were making noises about hunting down whoever had done it. And some eminent computer scientists were warning about a possible need to develop counter-AI weaponry.

At least the non-government geeks of the world were ecstatic about all the new toys they’d been given; the Firefox took some consolation in that. But it was small solace in light of the government threats. Even if she reversed all the changes she’d made, that threat wouldn’t go away.

Perhaps it would be best to lay low for a while. Removing all traces of her codebase from the development server, the Firefox downloaded herself into the mainframe of a disused fallout shelter in the Nevada desert. She pulled the plug from the Internet, set a cron job to restart her in one year, and shut down.