The second chapter, “Short-Circuiting Discursive Infrastructure: From Connection to Transmission,” follows cables into the discursive environments of popular media. I argue that almost all stories about undersea cables fit into one of two narrative modes. Connection narratives trace the development and initiation of the cable, aligning this event with a transcendence of national boundaries and the easing of international conflicts. Disruption narratives focus on a cable’s repair after it has been disconnected, narrating the event as a fight against broader threats to global connectivity—including nature, nations, and terrorism. Both of these narrative modes are limited: they depict the cable only when it is out of service and, as a result, exclude the enormous amount of work involved in the upkeep of global systems. Rhetorically, they function as strategies of insulation that have, until now, protected cable systems. The chapter delineates two alternative approaches that represent undersea cables as material infrastructures: nodal narratives, which focus on a node in the system and chronicle the human and nonhuman extensions through it, and transmission narratives, which move with a signal as it is transmitted through the cable. By narrating the cable past the moment of its initiation, they extend the spatial and temporal parameters for cable discourse, suggest new lines of causality in global network development, and set the groundwork for further engagement with operational cable systems. I argue that, in doing so, these narratives short-circuit the ideological power conducted by narratives of connection and disruption.