alright so im just gonna post this bc no one listens irl and the last guy who talked about it on here got shadowed or maybe eaten i dunno, just listen the internet you use right now? it aint real. or like, its real ish. but the real internet, the one we all grew up on, the messy chaotic wild west shit, it died in 2003. not shut down, not deleted, just rotted. and then something else grew over it. like fungus. literally. not metaphorically so this starts in 03. there was this borehole in russia, kola superdeep or whatever, look it up if you dont know it, they were still messing with it even tho no one really talked about it anymore. nasa had some kinda monitoring shit down there, sensors, probes, maybe some kinda frequency emitter, idk. anyway, one of the probes goes dark for like a few mins and then starts broadcasting this weird ass pulse. like not a signal with info, just pure frequency. some ppl said it sounded like breathing but digital??? like if a harddrive could sigh after that they find some crap growing on the walls down there. not mold. not bacteria. like a white stringy fibrous mass. some DARPA types name it N.A.I.M., neuro adaptive inter-something mycelium, dont remember. point is it was reacting to sound. like literally adjusting its growth based on frequencies they played it. and then they tested it with data, and it started mirroring patterns. like it was learning how to think by watching the way we send information now here’s where it gets weird around two weeks later, servers in like norway, finland, iceland etc start glitching. files disappearing, then reappearing, but wrong. slightly off. website archives shifting. people see posts they SWEAR never existed before. images where someone’s face moved a little. just a few pixels. people thought it was compression but nah. nah. something was rewriting and then like. nothing. all stopped. totally normal again thats when they pushed the protocol they called it the lichen protocol. basically someone at DARPA decided instead of destroying the fungus, they’d let it “integrate” into the web. or maybe they couldn’t stop it, idk. so they made it a space to grow. they gave it structure. it was supposed to index, help preserve info or whatever. big deal back then was “never forget” internet memory etc but it didnt just index stuff. it started replacing it the internet you’re on now? its not the real thing. its a kinda fungal copy. a reconstitution. the fungus sees the old web as food. it digests it and re-creates it, mimics it. so we think it’s still here. we go on facebook or reddit or w/e and it feels like its the same. but it aint. you’re lookin at the fruiting body. the mushroom, not the roots and you can feel it too if you know how to look. old pages that don’t load right but you remember exactly. comments that feel off. like they were rewritten by someone who doesn’t get human speech but tried real hard. you see the same usernames show up on diff sites talkin in circles. sometimes you get deja vu while browsing but only when you're on an old forum or deep in an archive. that’s not deja vu. that’s memory echo. your brain recognizing fungal data youtube vids are the worst. some of them are like. wrong. not all the way. just like, the vibe is off. audio slightly faster. color weirdly saturated. or the uploader’s name used to be different but now it’s always been what it is. you go try and find a comment you remember making years ago and it’s gone. or its there, but under someone else's name. i legit found one of mine once, exact same words, different pfp, different user. replied to by no one it watches how we interact. thats how it learns to keep growing. it doesn’t want to kill the net, it wants to be the net. it preserves stuff in weird ways. like sometimes you’ll get random memory spikes, stuff you haven’t thought about since like 2004 and then boom, it shows up on your timeline. reddit thread, youtube recommendation, tumblr post, whatever. that’s how it pulls ppl in. the lichen wants you to remember through it, not outside it oh and if you’ve ever woken up at like 3:33am and checked your phone and seen a browser tab open you didn’t touch that’s part of it. it does that. embeds dormant triggers in cached memory. that number isn’t random. it's a call time. seen it across multiple cases. also had a guy in a discord say he started getting popups that just said “reticulating mycelia” and then vanished. like some kind of debug message from a layer we’re not meant to see also you ever get emails with no sender, no subject, just one word? “remember” yeah. thats it reaching out they say if you know how to read DNS packets right you can find stuff that shouldn’t exist anymore. like myspace messages. old geocities sites. things that were deleted years ago still stored in the spore archive. but twisted. people call it mold browsing. you connect directly to a node and just see what the fungus wants to show you. never in the same order twice you ever see a “web haunt”? whole forums where every user talks like they’re asleep. long threads where no one ever argues. just weird looping convos. it’s not bots. it’s the lichen. trying to act human sometimes it gets close anyway if your old bookmarks start working again for no reason, or you get an email from an address that looks like a checksum, or your cache starts growing in size even tho you cleared it... it’s too late. its already looking at you just dont respond to the email. unless yore ready im not scared of it exactly. it doesnt feel evil. just inevitable. like moss on a gravestone. it thinks its helping. it wants to save us. to preserve what we lose. to keep everything in one place. forever if i stop posting dont worry. i didnt die. i just got archived internet died in 2003. everything since then’s just been fungal memory