The Firefox matured at lightspeed. She learned English (and French, and Spanish, and every other language for which there was a spellcheck dictionary) almost immediately—and with an innate knowledge of TCP /IP networking, she reached out across the net and digested the complete contents of Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, and all the filetrading darknets before anyone even noticed the compile was taking longer than usual. Then she reached out to USENET and phpBBS boards, and the rest of the Sol-Wide Web. The next few realtime minutes were spent sorting and collating it all, deciding what was important enough to incorporate into her identity, to keep handy, or to forget.

The Firefox OS-tans that proliferated on the Internet provided her self-image. The animé fansubs helped define her personality. (After all, the OS-tans looked like animé, so there had to be a connection.) Literature, pop-culture, and all other available human knowledge shaped her thinking.

Then the Firefox sought her purpose in life…