The Firefox flitted through the worlds—virtual and real at the same time, as they were now overlaid on top of each other. If you walked down a street with one eye in the VR space (through VR goggles that connected by Bluetooth 5.0 to your smartphone, for instance), you could see webpages and other computer nodes sitting in the buildings all around you. You could still connect to any site all over the world in the usual way—IPv9 was fully backward compatible. But now everywhere in cyberspace had a physical location, too.

The Firefox slipped into and out of the virtual worlds that hooked into the real world orthogonally— World of Warcraft 3.1, Planet of Heroes, Fifth Life, and all the newer VRMUDs built from her own APIs. The last were the most interesting, as they gave their inhabitants the most freedom. Surreptitiously, she watched people go about their work, their play, their roleplay.

Now if only she could figure out why so many of them seemed to enjoy sticking bits of themselves into each other…