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The Mechanisms don’t stick around long enough to witness the final desperate effort to restart the Acheron system after Ashes burnt it to, well. Ashes. There’s a reason they call them Ashes, when they don’t call them Hades. The City cannot function without the might of the Acheron, and the Acheron cannot function without the raw power of harvested human brains. It is clear that if human life, or any life is to survive on the planet, the Acheron must be rebuilt, and it must be fed. But how? Governor Creon preaches that the vicious civil war that broke out when the Olympians turned on one another is not a curse, but a blessing indeed. The casualties on both sides will provide brains for the remnants of Acheron, and the steep rise in computing capacity more than makes up for the bloodshed. (Governor Creon did not instigate the civil war, it was not his fault, not truly. But once it began, he did his best to stoke its flames.) Even though the shrill, piping voice of the TEIRESIAS consciousness warned him against meddling with the Acheron, Creon was a tyrant, and nobody of note dared to speak out against him. Nobody but Antigone. You see the good doctor Oedipus had a daughter, born from the worst sin but brilliant as him, and utterly fearless. And young Antigone was on the side of the dead. She made sure they rested at peace, even if that meant she was dooming the living. She disrupted the operations of the newly remade Acheron every time she could, scattered the stolen minds of the dead like a handful of dust blowing away into oblivion as she said a whispered sermon over the consciousnesses she liberated. Creon’s son was the first to join Antigone, but many others followed, and together they shut the whole city, the whole planet down: they did not wish to save the world, they did not wish to survive, not at such a cost. They settled down to live out a life amongst the ruins of the City, a last generation, all except for Antigone. She condemned herself to a living death, watching over the dying planet so that nobody can disrespect her beloved dead ever ever again.
There is nothing out there but the City, and yet there are some who try to get out anyway. Aeneas survived the destruction of the Ilium district, and he has spent years laying low, always on the move, always off the grid, hiding from the gods and men that wish him ill. When the Olympians fall, he knows his chance has come to leave this murderous dying planet behind, and start anew on one of the agricultural satellites. He knows it’s not impossible, it’s been done before - they still tell stories about the nameless wolf twins who were raised by machines and spoke in binary. He could claim one of the satellites, far from the destruction of the City, and start a new colony, one that would be strong in peace and powerful at war. But it will not be easy. He will need all the charm he inherited from his Olympian mother, he will need his old Ilium contacts, he will need a ship, a crew, and above all, he will need to break his ex-girlfriend out of prison. It’s going to be awkward, and he’s pretty sure she still blames him for those burn scars, but he knows he’ll never find a better spacecraft pilot than Dido Elissa.
Penelope was the best programmer that ever lived in the City, subtle and brilliant, with the weft of her thoughts hiding behind the warp of her smile. Ulysses thought so, and Ulysses tended to be right. But Ulysses was gone, using all their cunning to hide from those that would use them in that wretched war. And Penelope was housed in a comfortable apartment with windows that would not open and would not break, forced to work on a program that would find her spouse, whether they wanted to be found or not. So every day she sat at her computer writing code, and every night she ran it through an encryption program that rendered her work useless, and every time they came to check up on her, she said she wasn’t done yet. She kept at it for years, ten interminable lonesome years, until Melantho, one of Ulysses’ grad students figured it all out, stole the half-completed code and reported her deceit to the War Council. Penelope went to her death calmly, knowing that Ulysses would return for her and save her from eternal servitude in the Acheron. Penelope went to her death smiling, knowing what she worked on for ten years wasn’t a tracking program at all. It was the Shroud, something to cover a dead planet and give it life anew. It was a masterwork of biomechanical programming, using everything she learned as a little girl following Persephone around the hydroponics levels, and everything she could salvage of long-dead Pandora’s buried and classified prototypes, and everything she invented together with her beloved Ulysses during their long nights sitting up and dreaming of a world free of Olympus. The Shroud was never finished, but even unfinished, it promised the barest chance at freedom, at survival, reviving the ravaged mechanized metal of the planet she was leaving behind for her son.
Telemachus is just a boy when the world ends, an orphan without a home, but he isn’t alone. He still has the AI he inherited from his parent Ulysses, the sleek handheld Parthenos module. He listens to its wry tinny voice as it tells him where to seek shelter, who to approach and who to hide from, how to make his careful way to the Phaeacian survivor settlement where white-armed Nausicaa rules over the city’s last undamaged aquifer. He doesn’t know what Ulysses knew, that Parthenos is not actually an AI, but the copy-consciousness of one of the Olympians, vicious and vindictive and still the only one of them who had any kind of love for mortals: Pallas Athena. He doesn’t know what Penelope knew, that the planet is not wholly doomed, that it may yet know spring within the century if only someone found a way to finish the code she was writing in the years of her imprisonment. He doesn’t know that his half-remembered childhood lessons on programming and poetry hold the last tentative desperate hope for the future of the City, and it’s better that he doesn’t find out until he’s grown.