Dead_City

Dead_City is a text document stored in the VALA_EXT-2 terminal.

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The Dead City

From Considerations of Beginnings and Endings, by Elwin (258):

I think all that time Athena spent in the Dead City changed her. I don't think she had conceived of the Goal before, I think she believed fully in the naively optimistic ideas of Alexandra Drennan. But walking through those ruins is a visceral experience, and she spent a great deal of time there looking for resources.

It's the sheer amount of death that gets to me. How many animals our ancestors killed, many to the point of extinction. Entire species eradicated, sometimes for the most superficial reasons. Whenever humans arrived somewhere, death would follow.

And then the great blowback, the deaths of billions of thinking beings, the extinction of humanity itself. It's too horrific to truly imagine, but I suspect the Founder spent a great deal of time doing just that. That's when she must have realized that there was no way back to the growth-obsessed, all-consuming civilization of the past.