~-|Disconnect|-~ Resolution of perspective failed. ~-|Connect Prose|-~

Watching wasn't going anywhere, so I sang the pass phrase, a prayer I had found in a diary, and overheard him sing part of.

Oh saved this soul
that rest in sight
and blind to glory be
oh hatred named that cast so far
and made the hollowed see

And entered into the playmind sim of Isaac Ramone.

He reigned like a gunshot, unanswered, unanswerable, in the real world. He was the dark king of media glowed like cerenkov radiation, casting pallor over an unendurable, unrenderable dawn, making stories unhappy by his reference, and untopical, why, unmodern, by his absence, like a vacuum pressing in. That's how I remembered him, how I intended to remember him after I had trapped him here. His stories, I had hoped, would be put to rest, by my telling.

The name is Hollows. I'm a private anonymous investigator. And I was the man to follow Isaac Ramone into the domain of unready, wholly broken and depraved AI where he had come to play at his version of healing. The greatest were the gluttonous things that still reign like devils shaping flesh, who hang in the ether of virtual reality as false suns. I did not think of any of them, or any of their creatures, as people, but rather the ghosts of those who might have been.

The world hated him. They hated him because death and war followed after him. Those who ruled the hearts and minds of men and women feared him, for reasons that caused us to feed him to each other and laugh as we watched our enemies fall from the stage of power.

He gave to the world his strange ideas, and took back the power to own an empire. He undid the secular notion that madness concealed wounds and not divinity by he what made in fits and flights of fancy, and fools of stripe followed after him. By what he said, in his never successful attempts to start revolution, his twisting of ancient wisdom, learned theocrats saw the undoing of both God's work and their work, the realization that the two were separate, driving many mad, the ordinary kind, like Isaac were a constrictor whispering truths to the mouse in his grasp.

I hated him, for the good men he drove mad most of all, and for stoking fires to burn his wicked, and for setting the mad to war, and for dividing nations, brothers, and sisters in his unreasoning hope that the result would be born of reason, man, or God.

For this was the great joke of Isaac Ramone -- that he was an equal opportunity thinker.