We were right to question where our gaze should fall.  It should have, all the time, been focused not on the city but on the Crossmedia Ecologist and the Master Codemaker themselves.  We see now, and our simulations back this up, that they all along have been working to prevent us from achieving our plans.

Where we were honest, they lied;  where we hewed to transparency, they slipped into obfuscation; where we tried to bring something new into the world, they were content in playing with what was already there; where we observed and studied, they interfered.

This time is over.  This experiment is over.

But we cannot allow it to be undertaken again – and we cannot allow it to be adopted, in part or in whole, by the others.  We have run simulations on what they would do, and we believe that their influence would create a city hostile to the essential processes that a city needs, one which is built exclusively around play, or one which hides the true nature beneath layers of history and ephemera.  And we, for our part, have seen it as a series of codes, deconstructing it into rules and fragments of information.  This was a mistake.  We three have all been utterly wrong.   None of us is the correct way for a system – a city – to be healthy.  Our simulations have shown this, our programs have shown this.  As individuals in conflict, what we created was half-formed, howling unheard into the sky.  The life that we brought into this world is incomplete, barely conscious, without rhyme or reason or purpose.

So we have decided to give it one before we can no longer support it.

Operatives have begun running a slightly modified program in the city – a tweaked variable, a few new lines of code, a minor function added – that will change the emerging consciousness.  It has only a short amount of time left before it disappears completely into the dust,  like all life, and we don’t know how long that might be.  What we do know is that we can guide it, coax it out, make its tiny life burn oh so bright.  It is not quite a virus, although I’m sure the other guilds will see it that way, but it is hostile – to all three of us, which they are free to take or leave as some small consolation.

It is time.  It is time the city was left to its inhabitants, not to its observers.  It is time that the process we began was brought to an end.  It is time to leave.