Match in the Server Room (Broadcom’s Fire)

[Verse 1 – restrained, baritone, detached but emotional] Neon hum on the glass of the server room floor Blue LEDs blink like a city I can’t afford We built our sky out of clusters and borrowed time Now every license reads like a corporate crime Tight jaw, late calls, staring down another quote Watching all the years I spent get sold off by the note They dressed the blade up as “efficiency and scale” Signed it with a smile and they called the wreck a sale [Pre‑Chorus – tension rising, drums and bass push forward] And the numbers climb like elevators in the night All my careful failover going out of sight They say it’s just “the market,” just “adjusting to the cost” But I can feel the ground go missing underneath the frost [Chorus – explosive, soaring, widescreen] Broadcom lit a match in my datacenter veins Watched VMware fall in proprietary rain Took a quiet skyline and they turned off every light Now I’m driving through the outage of this long New York night We were kings of the cluster, now we’re ghosts in the logs Just a warning in red on a screen full of fog Broadcom drew a line through the life we engineered Now the city hums quieter, colder, and weird [Verse 2 – restrained again, more bitter] Hallways full of cardboard, names scratched off the doors Support lines rerouted into shareholder wars Partners learn by email they don’t live here anymore The future got compressed into one brutal quarter’s score My CIO asks why the cost is three times high I shrug and watch another promise flicker, fail, and die “Perpetual” was just another word they never meant A ghost they dragged across the contract and then bent [Pre‑Chorus 2 – more urgent, tom‑heavy drums] So we map the exits in the glow of status bars Plotting quiet migrations underneath the stars Every node a memory of when this used to feel like art Before they turned our refuge to a balance‑sheeted part [Chorus 2 – even bigger, add backing vocals] Broadcom lit a match in my datacenter veins Watched VMware fall in proprietary rain Took a quiet skyline and they turned off every light Now I’m driving through the outage of this long New York night We were kings of the cluster, now we’re ghosts in the logs Just a warning in red on a screen full of fog Broadcom drew a line through the life we engineered Now the city hums quieter, colder, and weird [Bridge – spacious, echoing, bass and drums locked in] In the hum of the fans I hear sirens sing Every quote, every clause, like a tightening ring If this is what they call “modernizing the ground” Why does every heartbeat sound like shutting it down? We script our escape in the shadows of the racks Moving workloads like thieves with the night at our backs They can monetize the ruin, name the ashes “cloud” We’ll be gone before the smoke can even find a crowd [Final Chorus – biggest, soaring vocals, guitar melodies high] Broadcom lit a match in my datacenter veins Watched VMware fall in proprietary rain Took a quiet skyline and they turned off every light But I’m steering through the static toward a different kind of night We were kings of the cluster, we were saints of the load Now we’re headlights on an unfamiliar road Broadcom wrote the ending in a language made of fear But I swear there’s another city waiting out there, clear [Bridge – spacious, echoing, bass and drums locked in]