Songfacts®:

• The Drones album tells the story of a man brainwashed into becoming a ruthless killer and merciless drone. Feeling uncomfortable and guilty, he escapes from the hands of his oppressors. A separate narrative from the rest of the LP, this track sees the same ex-drone operator finally having flown of the yoke of the authorities becoming a dictator. Its climaxes a full six minutes later with a countdown from 10 to the actual end of the world.
  
  "It is almost the same story with a bad ending," frontman Matt Bellamy explained to Rolling Stone of the song's self-contained storyline. "At the end you have the ghosts of the unknown dead that have been killed by robots that will never see justice and we'll never see who they are, haunting us."
• The 10-minute apocalyptic multi-part epic features three different sections. Bellamy told Q magazine: "The first half. Sounds like something from a film, then it goes to a middle section that's metal, then the outro is a big piano ballad."
• Bellamy told Annie Mac on BBC Radio One the song is a sequel to the Origin of Symmetry track "Citizen Erased."
• With a length of 10:07, this is the longest song in Muse's catalogue, overtaking "Citizen Erased" at 7:21.