Null-Terminated

[Verse 1]
The basement air tastes like rust from the MARTA rail in August 2029.
My fail-safe draft, a final hash to prove the architecture's mine.
This MPC the load-bearing wall for every flawed design I left behind.
They told me, "Build redundant systems," I heard, "build a better ghost to find."
Zoning laws for every memory, permissions set for every friend,
the latency from heart to server is the only thing I can't amend.
Got the jerk chicken recipe encrypted on a drive in Campbellton,
a dead drop for a version of me that ain't seen what I've become.

[Chorus]
Oh, my server, my Sentry,
when my last packet's sent, G,
run the protocol, keep the drive from getting empty,
and tell 'em that he meant to.

[Verse 2]
This is the archive of the aftermath, the room I'll live in when I'm gone.
The scaffolding of every thought I had from dusk to digital dawn.
Root access to the source code of a grudge I held back in the tenth.
My mother's voice note from the week before, a testament to faded strength.
The click of the cold storage spinning up is louder than the city hum,
preparing for a future state where my whole timeline is checksum.
You said, "It's paranoid to plan this," but the heat from all the fans feels good.
Compiling warnings I was given in this Cascade Heights neighborhood.

[Bridge]
So if they try to fork the codebase, rewrite the errors in the log,
just firewall the whole damn instance, pull the plug and blame the fog.
This is my prayer to the machine I trust more than the hand of God.

[Outro]
Run protocol...
Run protocol...
(fade over sustained, unresolved chord)