Culpability

Allusions to mythology appear throughout the narrative as a motif that illuminates the characters’ relationships with one another. Eurydice has the most explicit connection to her mythological namesake. Her appearance foreshadows danger, and Alice jokes that Eurydice’s name portends ill for her brother. These fears come to fruition when their relationship’s intensity leads Charlie to follow Eurydice out into a storm, echoing Orpheus’s descent into Hades, and come back without her. Though Eurydice lives, the connection between her actions and the myth amplifies the assumption that she died rather than survived the storm.

Lorelei also employs comparisons to mythology in her descriptions of humanity’s relationship to AI. Lorelei sees people on extreme polarities that she compares to the Venus and Adonis myth: Either they are like Adonis, “confident in [their] invulnerability and oblivious to peril” (87), or they are overanxious about danger, like Venus. This metaphor extends into the Cassidy-Shaw family’s dynamic, as Charlie acts like Adonis with his carelessness, and Noah and Lorelei are like the hovering Venus, constantly worried about protecting their son from danger.

In addition, Noah uses mythological figures to make sense of his relationship with Lorelei. He compares himself to the cupbearer of Olympus and views Lorelei as Zeus, the apex figure within an elite circle of the world’s movers.