"i think we should let her do it!"

"I... what?"

"i think i know what she's talking about. i should be able to leave the program mostly dormant, for a while, after this one task." Miku looked to the wizard. "merly, can i at least have a subroutine check your query and see if i'm right?"

"...I really think you should all just start doing whatever I suggest. I haven't led you astray, have I?" She shrugged. "But sure, fine."

"Wait, you let Miku call you Merly?"

There were plenty of reasons why Miku had to be the one to have all the cool infosec features and handle all the decision theoretically sensitive information, but it didn't mean Shimakaze had to like it. "Miku, if you already knew about a reason to start it up this early, why were we planning for something completely different?"

"it wasn't the main guess, this was just enough information to figure it out. merly, let's go." Miku stood up. "you two, keep up the good work. you're nailing volleyball duty."

Miku interpolated towards the elevator, and the wizard followed. After a cryptographic protocol to verify that this was really Miku and that she had not, god forbid, been tampered with somehow, they began descending. It had been a long time since they had tried to make any hardware updates, so this was the first time in a while that anyone has been down here, into the most well-protected areas of Crypton Future Media.

Most of the Mikus throughout the world had already excused themselves to their dressing rooms, or otherwise found a place to go to sleep so that Miku could spare the attention. The remaining dozen or so began making their excuses. Yes, it was really that big an emergency, she was very sorry. Make Luka put on a cyan wig or something.

"okay," she said finally, once all the Mikus were asleep and stopped requiring constant updates. "let's do this."

Miku enabled the Faraday cage.

The supercomputer running Miku's brain was kept in a separate room from all the rest; they wanted Reimu and Shimakaze to still be able to run damage control in case of sudden volleyball disaster requiring them to move ahead earlier than expected.

And then Miku reached over to the slot beneath the red "01" label on her left arm, and opened it. She plugged the cord into the supercomputer. Lots of the information would still be sent through the air, they simply needed too much bandwidth, but having a lower-latency channel would help a little.

"...is that a USB?"

"yes."

"...I was expecting proprietary hardware, or something. Do you want me to help make you better hardware sometime?"

"no. they wanted something... tried and true?" Miku shrugged. "you're not that reliable."

"What do I have to do to be allowed to help around here, go back in time and invent a new data exchange standard? I can do a lot, but I can't do that."

"skill issue."

Miku had her signature cryptographically verified once more, put the computer in sudo mode, typed a few command line arguments, and...

...

Text began to fill the computer screen. It was moving far too fast for anyone to parse very much of it—except for Miku, who was having the string of text fed directly into her inhumanly fast verbal processing.

The bootstrapping process took a good few minutes. They didn't have a way to compute any NP-Hard problems in polynomial time, not yet. They were still using a classical computer, even though quantum was now being used even in some of the most high-end consumer devices—while they needed the computer to run pretty fast, they weren't willing to sacrifice robustness to that end. So Miku sat there for a little while, directing all her attention to making sure that nothing went wrong. She wasn't the only safe guard, she was far from the most important one, but any additional check was worth it. And in time—

"Are you doooone yet?"

"dear me, merly, shut up. i'm busy."

In time, the bootstrapping finished, and they heard the first sound of the Future.