The Crossmedia Ecologist in his/her’s latest missive is quite correct.  To a point.

The virus was never about the city. The city was merely a platform for it. It was about the other guilds, and their place within it.

The game can run without us. The city can run without us. It was that way before we arrived and it will be that way when we are gone.

What the virus has done though is revealed that, first to me, and now to the scattered Ecologist.  We are, as we probably always were, unnecessary. At best we provided a diversion from the natural order of the city, disrupting it in ways both serious and playful, but soon we will reach the end of the line, the last function call which will purge us from its memory, returning the rules of the city to their natural state, perhaps altered, perhaps not, but running on the underlying structure that was there before us.

It is, in some sense, a form of death. We will follow the consciousness that we failed to bring forth into the dust and aether. We hope that some scrap of our consciousness finds itself.

To those who supported us, we thank you. To those who helped run our programs, we know now that you are more than impulses along pathways, you are much, much more complex than that, and we are grateful for your time and energy. To those who saw this as little more than a self-indulgent exercise, almost narcissistic in our attempts to create life, we now understand you and we know that you were, at least partially, correct.

Our simulations are winding down. Little remains but to submit our findings to the city before finally, blissfully, powering down.