undersea cable shrine
Mankind put their first submarine communications cable gruffly to the bottom of the ocean in the 1850s, at the dawn of our brave new world. As the years of industry turned to decades, and then into over a century of advancement, Man's technological aspirations and appetite grew in size and complexity. Year after year, we laid hundreds, even thousands more lines, making an unkempt, coiled mess of the seabed. The one thing, as you know, nature abhors more than a vacuum, is an unmade bed — so it seemed only too natural when the cablespiders arrived.
By the time the first research vessels started gathering readings and imaging of the spiders, even the smallest observed was nearly thirteen feet across. The largest were practically leviathan, upwards of fifteen hundred feet from end to end. Deep sea creatures floated idly around their immense arms as they worked, lifting lines from sediment and weaving them together with near-geological slowness. Their immense steps across the seabed cast great storms of current and sand reverberating for miles. The spiders, lacking eyes and chelicerae, seemed to work tirelessly, never stopping to hunt or eat or even sleep.
Within a few years, the spiders transitioned from merely rearranging the lines to laying new ones of their own — their spinnerets glowed deep red with thermal inertia as they extruded new cabling, made of a flexible crystalline matrix, which we observed carried signals with exponentially more speed and fidelity than our crude copper-and-steel-sheathing affairs. We modeled our own fiber optic technology after these discoveries.
Eventually, much of the sea floor was interconnected one way or another. When we tried to leverage the new systems for our terrestrial telecommunication, we realized that that many, many more signals than ours were traveling aboard the lines, originating from abyssal depths. Attempts to decipher these signals resulted in all manner of side effects in the observing scientists, from minor contusions at the base of the skull, to nearly complete demyelination, almost overnight.
So we stopped trying to understand, stopped trying to augment, and in the early 1990s settled instead to merely piggyback on a small portion of the cablespiders' network, to expand a new information sharing technology we were working on. This is generally considered the birth of the term "world wide web".