Peer didn’t much care if they were found or not; all that really mattered to him was the fact that the City’s computational infrastructure was also constantly expanding, to enable it to keep up with both the growing population, and the ever-increasing demands of Elysian Standard Time. As long as that continued, his own tiny fraction of those resources also steadily increased. Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal
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