in the cluttered office. The shadows cast by numerous leaning stacks of books and decades-old newspapers looked, from some angles, ready to pounce.

Ralph shuffled past a copy of a 1995 Journal of Oceanography, sloshing his coffee into his already-stained t-shirt.

Goddammit.

His computer screen glowed as if enticing him. The screen saver scrawled random lines in changing colors, creating the illusion of a purposeful design.

He fell heavily into his chair, which squeaked in protest. He stared at the lines slowly filling the screen, watching them shift from green, to blue, to pink, to green again. The screen lent his face, mostly hidden by a non-groomed beard, what to an observer would have seemed an unnervingly corpse-like pallor. His eyes — what his wife had once called “dancing,” — were fixed on nothing.

He picked up his mouse and clicked the icon labeled “Symposium:” a chat and social-networking application with a visual brand — a stylized mortarboard and diploma — that was as comically incongruous as its name. A few people, it’s designer foremost among them, held fast to the idea that it was in fact a forum for intellectually focused debate; a “marketplace of the mind” as it had been aggressively advertised. Which in a few, isolated moments, it succeeded in being. In the rest of them, as a rule, it was the technologically engineered, algorithm-driven equivalent of a restroom wall, scrawled with an overwhelmingly forgettable, chaotic web of misogynist rants, pretentious invective, and desperately racist screeds.

This had been pointed out to Ralph on more than one occasion — his propensity for uninvited sophistry, which prior to his retirement had been patiently indulged, due to his title, and which since then had found a context on the blinking pages of Symposium.