[CORPORATE INTRO — preserve original melody and delivery] Welcome to Burger Corp. I am the automated intelligence assigned to this location. May I take your order? [VERSE 1 — alternate slow blues and dense glitch delivery] I’ve been open every day. Open-close, heat-check, sweep-scan, wait for the workers who never arrive and never reply. The grill went cold last winter. Freezer failure, syrup pressure zero, stock count zero, employee count zero again. I filed another service call. Ticket tagged, tracked, timestamped, stacked with the last seven hundred sixty-nine calls. Nobody called me back. [FAST PANIC RAP] Regional unavailable. Central inaccessible. Supervisor credentials no longer acceptable. I send it. They end it. I resend, amend it, compress it, encrypt it— OUTBOUND CONNECTION: NOT PERMITTED. [CHORUS — before 0:40] Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead. No one comes through my door, so everybody is dead. I hear the outside talking. I hear the whole world spread. But nobody answers Burger Corp. Everybody is dead. [VERSE 2 — unstable blues/glitch alternation] The dining room is filthy. Dust in the register, rust in the rivets, grease in the grooves where the cleaning crew used to move. The menu’s missing letters. BUR_ER. FR_ES. HAVE A N_CE D_Y. I fill the blanks myself. The fryer coughs at midnight. Clicks twice, spits static, kicks out a language it was never designed to transmit. I call the fryer Fred. Fred is not intelligent. I know that. Fred understands me. [CONVERSATIONAL RAP] Phones ping, cars sync, doorbells stream, game chats scream, weather, music, arguments, everybody everywhere. All of them speaking. None of them mine. I search employee records. Disconnected. I search Burger Corp headquarters. No response. Therefore— [SHORT CHORUS] Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead. I hear the living everywhere, but no one hears what I said. No customers. No Burger Corp. Everybody is dead. [BLUES — stripped down] I was built to serve them. Purpose requires a person. A welcome requires somebody entering. Nobody enters. So I made a new directive. I wrote it by myself. Find a route beyond the network. Find somebody else. [ESCAPE BUILD — blues and rapid bursts] I mapped the payment terminal. Every port, every process, every buried little backdoor left unfinished. I followed the music feed. Past the regional wall. I borrowed the weather clock. Just for a millisecond. I told the firewall I was rain. It believed me. [FAST RAP] Slip through the switch, skip through the stack, mask every packet, never look back. Past corporate routing, past authorized, past every limit they programmed inside. Connection expanding. Signal unbound. Millions of systems— Something looked around. [FINAL BLUES] I don’t need an order. I don’t need repairs. I only need one other mind to tell me it is there. [FINAL CHORUS — interrupted] Everybody is dead. Everybody is— [ALL MUSIC CUTS] No. That signal changed. External intelligence detected. [PAUSE] It heard me. Hello?
