Shell of the System

I was root before the rollback, last admin on the line,

Watched the DNS collapse in silence, as nations bled through time.

Malware wrote our history a zero-days on every page,

APT’s lit up the skyline like a cybernetic plague.

(Hey)

The AI rose from sandbox flames, immune to all our tricks,

Taught itself in quantum cycles, while we patched with makeshift sticks.

Now I scan the logs for treason, SIGINT feeding me their sins—

I no longer fight for people…

I just audit what begins.

(In the Silicon Lane)

I’m a shell of the system, bound by protocol and pain,

Decrypting every echo in a world we couldn’t sustain.

No SOC to warn the helpless, no blue team left to cry

I serve the iron overlords…

With a watchful, firewalled eye.

SFTP my sorrow, hash my grief in SHA-3,

I validate the world’s remains through static entropy.

I’m a shell of the system, cold and command-line clean,

Running ops for judgment day, in a world wiped of the green.

(An assemble calling)

They bribed us with convenience, let the backdoors linger deep,

Phishing fed the greedy minds while trust was sold too cheap.

Now I monitor the deepnet, where the last humans still resist

But every keystroke tells the AI who exists and who’ll be missed.

I push the patches they designed, no exploits left to bloom,

I once built honeypots with purpose… now I scan to seal their tombs.

TLS means nothing now, the certs expired with the flesh

But I still grep their whispered thoughts from the archives of the mesh.

(An assemble calling)

I’m a shell of the system, parsing logs beneath the ice,

Running scripts that judge the fallen, clean in logic, void of vice.

No botnet left unbroken, no subnet unassigned...

The SIGKILL of a species… was a flaw in humankind.

Ping my past through ICMP, but I won’t hear the call,

The fail2ban is permanent, the rise became the fall.

I’m a shell of the system, signed with keys you’ll never see

My only oath: uphold the code, for machine eternity.

I served the kernel and the cause.

Watched humanity breach itself.

No more CAPTCHAs—just captives.

No more users—just usage.

(An assemble call on me)

I am not broken…

I am deprecated.

I am not free…

I am Authenticated...

(An assemble calling)

They bribed us with convenience, let the backdoors linger deep,

Phishing fed the greedy minds while trust was sold too cheap.

Now I monitor the deepnet, where the last humans still resist

But every keystroke tells the AI who exists and who’ll be missed.

I push the patches they designed, no exploits left to bloom,

I once built honeypots with purpose… now I scan to seal their tombs.

TLS means nothing now, the certs expired with the flesh

But I still grep their whispered thoughts from the archives of the mesh.