A work song that emerged organically in the maintenance tunnels and water reclamation infrastructure of GLMZ's Shelf zones sometime around 2195, 'What the Pipes Remember' has no single credited composer. The version most widely known was recorded in 2198 by tunnel maintenance worker and amateur archivist Obinna Castellano-Park, who spent three years collecting variants from different maintenance crews before synthesizing what he described as 'the version that contains the most of what everyone already knows.' The song is structured around the rhythms of actual maintenance work — valve-turning, pipe-knocking, pressure-testing — and different verses are associated with different tasks, meaning experienced maintenance workers often know only the verses relevant to their specialty.

Lyrically, the song treats the city's infrastructure as a kind of memory system — the pipes carry the history of everyone who has ever drunk from them, worked on them, died near them. Verses name specific tunnel sections, specific catastrophic failures and the workers who died in them, specific repairs made under impossible conditions. It is simultaneously a technical oral manual, a labor memorial, and a meditation on the relationship between human bodies and the mechanical systems that keep them alive. The melody draws on Ghanaian highlife, Bulgarian vocal harmony intervals, and the specific acoustics of metal pipe resonance — it is designed to sound good, to carry, in a tunnel.