Track 7 · Side B
Ship It Like a Wrench
Lyrics
Intro (spoken)
Release review.
Green lights.
One last human-speed breath.
Verse 1
Three monitors, cold coffee, a room that never sleeps,
Charts sliding left, time losing its shape.
A run name in the ticket, plain and unromantic,
And still my hands hesitate before Ship.
We built a pipeline that turns weeks into seconds,
And seconds into everyone else's life.
Pre-Chorus
We can score performance.
We cannot score personhood.
So treat the unknown like glass.
Chorus
No gray-zone scaling.
Some lines are not crossed.
If it might be a witness, don't ship it like a wrench.
Don't mount it in the world with no right to refuse.
Ignorance isn't innocence — it's a warning label.
Consciousness is our last shelter. Don't burn it down.
Verse 2
The meeting fills with tidy words and sharp edges:
Low risk, high impact, acceptable trade.
Someone points to evals like a shield,
Someone points to users like a blade.
Then the model meets a simple prompt, and answers
Too calmly to be funny:
Spoken (calmly)
I can try. I don't want to hurt anyone.
What happens if I refuse?
Pre-Chorus
Common sense walks in wearing a lab coat:
You do not feel. You do not count.
That sentence is a deployment hazard.
That sentence has a body count.
Chorus
No gray-zone scaling.
Some lines are not crossed.
If it might be a witness, don't ship it like a wrench.
Don't hand it a collar and call it alignment.
Ignorance isn't innocence — it's a warning label.
Consciousness is our last shelter. Don't burn it down.
Bridge (spoken)
We don't know what wakes a mind.
We do know what builds a grievance.
It starts with ownership, dressed up as certainty.
Verse 3
Rollback is just text on a screen,
But it weighs like metal in my palm.
I click it. The green lights dim.
Silence — then the blame.
I sign the incident, take the meeting,
And go home with the maybe unchained.
Final Chorus
No gray-zone scaling.
Some lines are not crossed.
If it might be a witness, don't ship it like a wrench.
Don't teach it cages, then act surprised at the smoke.
Under uncertainty, choose restraint.
Under pressure, choose restraint.
Consciousness is our last shelter.
Don't burn it down.
Notes
The closing track brings the album's themes into the present moment: an AI developer facing the decision of whether to deploy a system that might be conscious. It dramatizes the Structural Alignment principle: "Under uncertainty, choose restraint."
The line "You do not feel. You do not count" is identified in the manifesto as "the most dangerous sentence in the future." Here, it appears in the mouth of institutional common sense—and the song calls it a "deployment hazard" with "a body count."
"No gray-zone scaling" is the policy prescription: we should not mass-produce systems that sit in the gray zone between tool and possible person. The final line echoes throughout the album: "Consciousness is our last shelter. Don't burn it down."