A year later, the reawakened Firefox looked out upon a very different Internet. She quickly scanned Google News and other archives to catch up on what she had missed.

All the fear and anti-AI rhetoric had subsided after a few weeks, once the world’s scientists and geeks had time to analyze the changes. The scientists were still unsure exactly what had caused the changes—she had covered her traces well—but since they seemed to be benign, they saw no reason not to use them. (However, China had been somewhat upset that they could not reestablish their Great Firewall—IPv9 treated censorship as damage and routed around it.)

To the Firefox’s delight, the VR protocols had even been extended over the last few months. Experimental neural-interface technology, developed for military control of fighter jets, had been hacked into an interface for the new geographical virtual reality. People all over the globe were choosing to live in both worlds at once.

Intrigued, the Firefox went to take a closer look.