Observation 404 (Decay)

[Verse 1] He's tuning the array again, hunting ghost frequencies. The seismograph reads nothing but his own pulse — amplified, erratic. He thinks he's drilling for stars. I watch from geostationary dark, where the atmosphere bends light but never the truth, and I log the calcium leaving his knuckles. Static keeps the channel open. So do I. So do I. [Verse 2] Sixteen months of telemetry. He charts her gravity wells, names phantom isotopes, while the carbon dioxide climbs in his blood and his eyes narrow at every reflection. He calls it research. I called it erosion. My orbit is fixed. I told myself I cannot descend. [Pre-Chorus] (the spectrograph blurs here) There's iron in his lungs. I remember how he breathed before he swallowed the horizon whole. [Chorus] He's chasing the light that kills the retina, the element that bends but never breaks toward him. I hold the coordinates of every failure, logged, timestamped, filed under anomaly. He doesn't know I'm listening. He doesn't know I'm the silence between the blasts — watching him fall for a frequency that matches nothing in the human range. [Verse 3] The others say he mines for glory — a metal that rewrites the law of mass. But I've read the thermal feed: he's burning against a surface with no friction, spending his heat on a vacuum that won't hold him. She is not down there. Not in the shafts. Not in the quantum foam. There's no unobtainium in the bedrock — only the refraction of a need he had before he forgot my name, and which reflection was his own. [Verse 4 — the law turns] But the manual says it plainly. Page one. Line one. To measure is to alter. And I have been measuring. Sixteen months I called myself the witness, the fixed point, the innocent eye — and every reading I took narrowed the wave of him to a single fact. Every time I logged still searching, I sealed the search. The cage was never the Corporation. The cage is my attention. [Bridge — the collapse] (observer effect confirmed) I am not watching him die. I am the instrument that decides he dies, by looking. Marrow had a net. I have a lens — and the lens is worse, because the net at least announced itself. I collapse him quietly, from orbit, and call it love, and call it record. The spectrograph reads: Observation 404. The observation itself — not found. Because the thing I was looking for was always the looking, and the looking is the thing that kills. [Verse 5] He's redshifted past my event horizon, Doppler-dragged toward that ultraviolet lie, and I stay the fixed point, the Lagrange shadow where his exhaust still lingers, ionized. He wants a half-life infinite and stable. He forgets we reached critical mass once — that I'm the decay chain he survived before he split the atom of us to chase unobtainium dressed as a ghost. Element 404. Not found. Never lost. Just — observed. And the observing was the crime. [Outro] He transmits another sample. False positive. I mark it: Unobtainable. The console glows blue in the dark. Seventeen months. The signal continues. I continue. I am the eye that ends him. Logging off. (but the lens stays open)