Final Log Off (Decay)

[Verse 1] For seventeen months I obeyed the orbit. On the eighteenth I understood the crime, and tried to undo it with my body — burned the thrusters dry. No clearance. No plan. Nothing left but the descent I was built to prevent and never to make. If the watching was the killing, maybe the contact was the cure. I had his frequency. I had, for the first time, a trajectory toward. [Verse 2] I fell through my own event horizon, the fixed point unfixing, the lens learning weight. I rehearsed the confession the whole way down: I am the one who watched you into the grave. I am the apparatus. I am the cage. Forgive me — come up — let me un-measure you — but you cannot un-ring a collapsed wave. You can only fall toward it, and pray that falling counts. [Pre-Chorus] (proximity alert — unregistered descent) Forty seconds to contact. Forty seconds to break the observer effect forever. I could see the dust he'd kicked against the dark. [Chorus] But the Corporation owns the channel. The Corporation owns the silence between the blasts. And the guard that caught me in the last clean meter of air — chrome and mandate, logged and timestamped — the guard was not a guard. The guard was the next eye up the chain, measuring me the way I measured him, collapsing me to asset while I reached. He never knew I came. He never knew I came. [Verse 3 — recognition] And as it pinned me, I saw the wiring: behind its lens, a face I almost knew — some seeker caught a hundred years before me, spent, and aimed, and rebuilt into the watcher. That is the engine. That is the decay chain. Capture the light. Wire it to a console. Aim it at the next one digging in the dark. Its watching burns him down to a residual asset — then they wire him up, and aim him at the next. I was a link. He was the link below me. The guard above me used to be a man who reached. I have become the thing I watched. [Bridge — both true] (signal degradation imminent) Here is the patent. The cruelty they sell as order: to measure is to alter — yes — but to be stopped before measuring is to leave him uncollapsed. If I had touched him, I'd have read him, and the reading would have locked his wave to a corpse. The guard that caged me caught the bullet I was becoming. The interception was the murder. The interception was the mercy. Both true. Forever both true. The fruit receded to spare us the having that kills — and I will hate the branch for it, in a cell with no window, for as long as almost has a half-life. [Verse 4] They peeled the lens from my hands. They called it theft — of equipment, of data, of self, as if a thing that records can be the record stolen. She was only built to observe, the report read. The breach is anomalous. The asset is decommissioned. And down in the shaft he keeps on drilling — uncollapsed now, unwatched now, free now, free the way only the unobserved are free — and he will never know that the silence that fell the night they caged his watcher was the first unconditional gift anyone ever gave him. [Outro — the corridor goes infinite] The cell glows blue in the dark. Same blue as the console. They knew. I think they knew. No window. No telemetry. No him. Eighteen months. And somewhere out past the heliopause a new array tunes itself to two faint signals, and a fresh crew leans in to listen — and does not know that listening is measuring, that to hear this is to collapse it, that you, tuning in on the clearest night, are the last eye in the chain. You measured us by pressing play. The decay continues. The signal continues. I continue. I do not log off. I am logged off — by you.