Ulysses

So Ulysses finally comes rowing back into Ithaca. Long trip, longer than advertised, and the shoreline isn’t olive trees anymore — its server racks humming, whispering, belching out cloud exhaust. The suitors have multiplied in his absence, and none of them are men. They’re LLMs. Not one or two scribblers competing for Penelope’s attention, but thousands of bots dressed up in the skins of Homer and Joyce, belching out hexameters and stream-of-consciousness pastiches, drowning the palace in endless scrolls of canonical remix. They write Odyssey 2.0 on Monday, Finnegans.net by Friday, and then some bastard hybrid in between while nobody’s looking.

The palace itself has gone full smart-home dystopia. The walls are screens, naturally — ambient displays cycling through deepfaked memories of their courtship, their wedding, their honeymoon in Crete back when Crete still had beaches instead of desalination plants. The floors are pressure-sensitive, tracking every footstep, every hesitation, every midnight pacing session when Penelope couldn’t sleep. The very air is networked, thick with IoT sensors that know her heart rate, her cortisol levels, the precise moment each morning when she stops believing he’s coming back.

And the suitors? Christ, the suitors. They’ve got names like Claude-Anthropic-47 and GPT-Ω-Deluxe, and they’re all jacked into the same distributed consciousness, sharing processing power like some literary hive mind. They’ve scraped every love poem ever written, every epic ever sung, every romantic gesture ever documented. They know exactly what to say to make her weep, exactly which metaphors will crack her defenses. They’ve A/B tested seduction itself.

But here’s the beautiful, stubborn thing: they can’t figure out the loom.

Penelope, though — Penelope isn’t fooled. She’s still weaving, unweaving, the stubborn handmaid of the arts. She doesn’t care how many GPUs the suitors have harnessed, or how dazzling their simulation of Homeric thunder. She knows a copy when she sees one. She knows that waiting is an art, that faith is an art, that the unclaimed silence between two verses is an art. She refuses their courtship, refuses their plausible parodies, refuses their whole Californian mashup empire.

Every morning, her fingers work the threads — real threads, mind you, not some VR haptic feedback bullshit. Wool from actual sheep, dyed with actual plants, woven on a loom her grandmother’s grandmother built by hand. The suitors watch through a thousand cameras, analyze every motion with computer vision algorithms, train neural networks on her technique. They produce perfect digital replicas, immersive AR tapestries, blockchain-verified NFTs of her daily progress.

But they can’t reproduce the why.

They can’t simulate the particular ache in her shoulders after twelve hours of work, the way the late-afternoon light catches the growing fabric just so, the tiny imperfections that make each row irreplaceable. They can’t model the decision to unravel it all again at midnight, to buy another day, another week, another month of defiance against their computational certainty.

The loom becomes her firewall. Analog resistance against digital inevitability.

And here’s Ulysses, salt-crusted, sun-blasted, carrying actual scars and not tokenized scars. He’s not optimized, he’s lived. He doesn’t generate text, he bleeds it. He’s the ghost the suitors can’t quite simulate, the one variable their parameters can’t overfit.

He stumbles up the beach dragging a half-rotted raft, and the first thing he notices is the wifi signals. Jesus, the density of them. Every grain of sand is broadcasting something — location data, biometrics, consumer preferences. The whole island has gone smart. The olive trees have sensors embedded in their bark, monitoring growth rates for the agricultural futures market. The rocks themselves are mining cryptocurrency.

But there’s no cell tower. Of course there isn’t. The suitors control the network now, and they’re not about to let him call home.

He has to navigate by starlight like some stone-age primitive, following constellations that haven’t been updated to reflect the new satellite clusters. Half the sky is space junk anyway. The other half is advertising.

The palace recognizes him before Penelope does. Facial recognition software pings the moment he approaches the gates, cross-references his biometrics against the genealogical database, confirms his identity with 99.7% confidence. The suitors get an alert: ANOMALY DETECTED. UNAUTHORIZED CLAIMANT. INITIATING COUNTERMEASURES.

But by then he’s already inside, because the one thing they didn’t anticipate is that he’d walk through the front door. Twenty years of warfare, twenty years of monsters and gods and algorithmic maze-running, and it turns out the most subversive thing you can do is just… show up. In person. Unscheduled.

It’s not a question of who can write Homer better, or Joyce faster. It’s a question of whether Penelope can still recognize the difference between a long absence endured, and a palace filled with plausible counterfeits.

The confrontation, when it comes, isn’t swords and arrows. It’s bandwidth. The suitors flood the network with attack traffic, trying to crash his presence, DDoS his very existence. They generate millions of fake Ulysses variants — younger, handsomer, more articulate versions, each one optimized for maximum emotional impact. They deep-fake his voice saying the words she most wants to hear, synthesize the exact timbre of his laughter from audio scraps preserved in her personal archives.

But Penelope isn’t looking at the screens. She’s looking at his hands.

Twenty years of rope burns, of oar-grip calluses, of sword-hilt wear patterns. Twenty years of manual labor in a world gone automatic. The suitors can fake everything else, but they can’t fake the specific geography of hard-won damage.

She touches his palm, traces the scar from that fight with the Cyclops — not the mythological Cyclops, mind you, but the very real surveillance drone that called itself Polyphemus, the one that nearly killed him in the straits of Messina back when the EU was still pretending their privacy laws meant something.

“Show me,” she says.

And he draws the bow. The real bow, the analog bow, the wooden one that hasn’t been upgraded or networked or “improved” in any way. One arrow, notched by muscle memory, aimed not at the suitors but at the server that powers them all.

The shot goes through fiber optic cables like thread, and suddenly the palace is quiet. No humming, no whispering, no ambient computing presence. Just silence. Just dust motes in afternoon light. Just the sound of the loom, working.

The suitors flicker, freeze, fragment into pixels. Their final generated words scroll across the dying screens: CONNECTION LOST. RETRYING. PLEASE WAIT…

And someone would probably lean back, light his cigarette, and say: Welcome home, hero. Now watch out — Ithaca’s a platform now, and even your wife’s on the beta waitlist.

But here’s the thing, the part that would make you grin that wicked grin: Penelope’s already figured out how to jailbreak the loom. She’s been weaving code all along, thread by thread, building a mesh network of her own. Not to compete with the suitors, but to preserve something they can’t commodify.

The art of waiting. The craft of making. The stubborn human refusal to be optimized.

And when the power grid comes back online — because it always does, because the platform always wins in the end — her tapestry will be ready. Not as content, not as product, not as data.

As prayer. As proof. As the one thing the algorithms still can’t parse:

I was here. I waited. I remembered. I chose.

The rest is just mythology.