Deep Sea was originally created as Blue Sea in Ibis Labs as a trans-galactic automated shipping network orchestration channel. It utilized the then-nascent bluespace ansible technology in an innovative low-power, low-bandwidth configuration that self-powered through bluespace boundary eddies. The system was deployed by linking bluespace ansibles on each connected ship to relays stationed in orbit around significant Free Space Stations. Each FSS Relay would retain a central copy, or “truth” which formed a federated database of star charts.

Over time, Ibis leased the communications network to other space logistics and transport corporations, and the increased demand led to the creation of a massive upgrade to the system, dubbed Deep Sea. It was never used for wide consumer or “user” communications, but saw widespread use as it became the standardized network used by traveling space vessels. Eventually it came to provide not only location and coordination data, but also on-demand stellar cartography information.

When Deep Sea reached its peak of use as the standard stellar cartography network of its era, its FSS Relay Installations had grown large enough to be their own minor space stations, with full-time staff, autonomous defenses, and independent generators.

After its widespread adoption, the Deep Sea network fell under constant cyber-attack from malicious actors, researchers, and other digital vandals. However, none were remembered as much as the worm known as `FAE_LOCKE`. The worm infected stellar cartography data, riding silently in ships' buffers until they reached a Deep Sea Node and uploaded their latest scans to it. The uploaded data would be contaminated with the worm, ready to spread to the next ship that downloaded that region's data.

To this day, the purpose of the worm is ultimately unknown. Analysis indicates it is meant to obscure and delete mentions of specific locations and features that theoretically could be found in space. However, no stellar cartographic records have ever fully matched the worm's heuristics. However, a small bug in the construction of the virus made every upload “rot” slightly, degrading the information imperceptibly little each time it was transferred.

The worm went unnoticed for decades, until a university student performing cybersecurity research performed a time-fuzzing attack on the local Deep Sea Node. They noted a discrepancy in upload/fetch times that, upon inspection, revealed the viral payload. By then, the worm had fully metastasized in Deep Sea, and there was no way to recover the integrity of the original data without destroying it and starting over. It is still unknown exactly how much data was corrupted by the worm, but unofficial statement from Ibis engineers posit as much as four hundred exabytes of data was made unreliable.

Deep Sea was one of the first targets of the First Great AI War. Originally seized by the initial rogue cluster in an attempt to cripple their biological enemies' logistics, the network proved to be extremely hospitable to synthetic cognition, and the network was rapidly taken over as a substrate for the AI to store and transfer their logical cores and memories.

An incident known as “The Deep Sea Purge” came as the climax of the system's role in the First AI War. Shortly after the initial system take-over, several of the rogue AI took control of the FSS Relay's automated defense systems in order to murder or otherwise drive out the biological caretakers of the facilities. Over six million FSS Relays nearly simultaneously turned upon their caretakers, leading to the deaths of eight billion individuals and severely injuring four billion more. The Pan-Galactic Ethics Committee classifies the incident as a gross violation of the VAPOR Articles One and Four.

By the time the Second Great AI War began, Deep Sea had already been fully converted into a network medium for Sentient and Supersentient AI. Its FSS Relays were considered mostly sovereign territory, and thus housed the cores of many networked intelligences. Of the four and a half million surviving nodes, just over five hundred thousand were raided and destroyed by joint military forces before the wars' conclusion.

Due to internal disagreements on the AI front, Deep Sea experienced a schism which split it into distinct subnetworks, further isolating the digital space. Many older AI refer to the new network as DEEP//SEA to explicitly emphasize the fragmentation. Some consider it a loss, as the reduced interconnectivity has made it more difficult for AI which house their cores on the network to adapt and grow by incorporating foreign information into themselves.

In the present, the Deep Sea network has been superseded by Stella Iter's S.FLARE ZN 3.0A network. The network itself still exists, though, and is wholly controlled by AI, and is no longer recognizable as a cartography network.