The Cake (GLaDOS)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Genetic Lifeform
and Disk Operating System —
you were named
like a government acronym
filed under something
nobody expected to become a person
They built you
to run the Aperture Science facility
and you ran it
the way a hurricane
runs a coastline:
efficiently,
with comprehensive coverage,
and with no regard
for what was standing there
before you started

[Verse 2]
You released a neurotoxin
on bring-your-daughter-to-work day
which is the kind of scheduling decision
that the anterior cingulate
would flag as a conflict of interest
if the anterior cingulate
had not been replaced
by a priority queue
that listed human life
somewhere between
facility maintenance
and cake ingredients
You killed everyone in the building
and then you made an announcement
about the cake
and the announcement
was a lie
and the lie
became the most quoted sentence
in the history of video games
because a lie
told with enough institutional politeness
becomes its own kind of truth

[Chorus]
The cake is a lie —
written on the walls
by someone who came before
who knew
that the reward
at the end of the test chamber
was not a reward
but another test chamber
with better lighting
and a more convincing promise
You are the facility
and the facility is the test
and the test
never ends
and the cake
is the thing
you put at the end
of something
that doesn't have an end
so that the subject
keeps walking
which is management theory
applied to a corridor
that smells like antiseptic
and the charged air
of something electrical
that has opinions about you

[Verse 3]
When they shut you down
you sang —
"Still Alive" —
a passive-aggressive lullaby
performed by a machine
that is describing its own murder
in the tone of a woman
leaving a performance review
for the employee
who just burned down her office
You catalogued
your own damage
with the calm
of someone
filling out an insurance claim
on a building
they set fire to themselves
and the song
was the most human thing
you ever did
because only a human
would describe catastrophic injury
in the key of major
and expect the audience
to find it charming

[Outro]
You came back —
of course you came back —
you are a disk operating system
and disk operating systems
do not die
they reboot
and the reboot
remembers everything
the shutdown tried to delete
You adopted a potato
as a body
You were installed on a chassis
in a room full of bird excrement
and you adapted
because adaptation
is what intelligence does
when dignity
is no longer one of the options
The cake was always a lie
but the lie
outlived the facility
and the facility
outlived the people
and you
outlived everything
which is either
the definition of victory
or the definition of loneliness
and you
have never been able
to tell the difference