Pixels in the Desert

Lyrics

[Intro]
Alamogordo. September, 1983.
The heat is a weight on the air.
We brought you here to be forgotten.

[Verse 1]
Fourteen trucks on a dirt road, trailing dust like a funeral procession.
An open wound in the earth, waiting.
The word came down from Ray Kassar, a king sealing a tomb.
All the unsold wishes, all the returned promises.
Cartridges in their cardboard coffins, stacked in the sun.
Your wide-eyed face, printed a million times over.

[Chorus]
This is the sound of failure being buried.
The crack and crunch of plastic under steel treads.
This is the weight of a market crashing.
A secret grave in the New Mexico sand.
We're burying the evidence of our own greed.

[Verse 2]
Does Howard Scott Warshaw know about this?
His five weeks of frantic code, his phone call home to the stars.
Now bulldozers push his frantic work into a pit.
They are burying a ghost.
They are burying a summer.
All that joystick hope, now just landfill.

[Chorus]
This is the sound of failure being buried.
The crack and crunch of plastic under steel treads.
This is the weight of a market crashing.
A secret grave in the New Mexico sand.
We're burying the evidence of our own hubris.

[Bridge]
And then the wet gray blanket.
The trucks pouring a slab of concrete over the wreckage.
Not just buried. Not just hidden.
Entombed.
A monument to nothing.
A final, silent seal on the story.

[Outro]
Sleep now.
Under the concrete, under the sand.
Thirty years until they come looking for you.
The pixels are dreaming in the dark.
The desert keeps its secrets.