hrmny (dot) app

S1

Fitz Jefferson settled into his leather office chair for a rushed lunch between lectures, hands navigating a mindless pre-lunch ritual, eyes locked on the innocuous pair of black glasses resting on his desk, mind thinking of the world that lived inside them.

“Welcome back, Fitz,” a faceless voice said.

Fitz closed one eye as he removed the thin glass contact from his left eye, dropping it into a clear solution next to its pair. He placed their container in a drawer to his left and blinked away some moisture. He snatched the frames, vision clearing again as he slid them over his nose.

“Class went well,” he said to the voice. “What can you tell me about the social app Harmony, Lume?”

“If you are referring to the one spelled without vowels, that does not sound like your type of inquiry. You are not one for ‘social,’ if I may say.”

Fair. “My students told me I should try it. I turned it into a discussion of the app’s ramifications on online communication. But I caved to their enthusiasm and said I’d look into it.”

“You would ‘look into it’ for experimental reasons, then?”

Spinning his chair around, Fitz pulled a warm plate of food from a miniature oven that had begun slow heating thirty minutes ago. He set the plate in the center of his empty desk and laid a knife and fork on either side of the plate. He nudged the fork to make sure it was perfectly perpendicular to the plate before proceeding.

“Experimental, exactly. I don’t think I’ll even know how to navigate it. Could you start my lunch play list, please?”

Lume dinged his confirmation, and a vinyl reproduction recording of Chopin’s forty-second nocturne filled the office. At the beginning of the fourth measure, Fitz sliced into his baked chicken, moving the knife back and forth to the tempo of the piece.

“Connecting your current book to you now, Fitz,” Lume announced.

Fitz’s lunch blurred from view, and a large book appeared in front of him. “Make the book a bit more transparent, will you? Right there.” At the end of the first nocturne, Fitz looked up from the book. “Do I have any messages?”

A beam of light appeared from the middle of the desk, displaying his office computer screen. In the upper right corner of the screen, zeroes showed beside his text and audio messages. Fitz nodded. Slow morning.

He returned to his book as the computer screen blinked away again, but he hesitated. “Lume?”

“Hmm?” Lume prodded after an extended pause.

“Will you download Harmony for me?”

“As you are on your assigned lunch, I am allowed to override work protocol and download items to your personal device. However, it would interfere with your own personal protocol. Are you sure you wish to continue?”

“Go ahead and override that protocol for now. I’ll poke around in the app for a few minutes before my next class. My students should be happy with me, right?”

Lume’s return laugh sounded more mechanical than anything else about the artificial assistant. “As you wish. You’ll see it appear in lens momentarily.”

Fitz began cutting his chicken again, falling into rhythm with the new nocturne after a few moments. He thought back to a time when he’d used his last social app. He was never “effective” at it. He didn’t like updating others on his activities. He didn’t feel he had anything to say. He honestly wasn’t interested in updates or thoughts from others either. His books had always been enough.

So why now?

He didn’t really know — it seemed something interesting to prove to his students. He could dip his toe into their world without getting swept up into the obsession they constantly dealt with. That was an aspect of social apps he never understood. Why not be measured with your use?

His lenses blurred for a second as he scooped a mouthful of rice onto his fork. A heartbeat later, the UI shifted to accommodate the app, mostly transparent to allow him to see his surroundings. The graphical elements of the app contrasted well with the current stark white walls and ceiling of his office. Fitz looked back and forth, and the app’s graphics followed his eyes. Other than the metal desk and chair, the small room only contained a side table with a potted aloe vera plant on top of his prized Riverside Shakespeare volume.

His lenses flashed and the words WELCOME TO HRMNY greeted him. He pressed onto the floating ENTER button. It asked him to create an account.

“Lume, do you mind setting that up for me?” Fitz took one of his final three bites of chicken.

“Unfortunately, because we are on the university premises, I am unable to complete personal account tasks. Adding the app to your device is the extent of my abilities. You, however, are free to set up the account manually. That does not violate university regulations.”

Fitz set his fork and knife parallel onto his dinner plate and settled back into his chair. “Let’s create a new account then.”

The UI transitioned to a new account setup option. He spoke his name, and the fields filled, offering him potential usernames. It also asked him for his preferred messaging address. He input his primary one, but before he could continue to creating a password, it prompted him to confirm his address was valid.

“Lume, looks like it sent me a confirmation to my messages. Pull those up, please?”

His office screen blipped back into existence before him, showing zero text and audio messages on his university account.

“No, not my office account. I need my personal one please, pulled up on my lenses will be fine.”

“As we are on the university network, I—“

“—cannot access personal accounts. Right.” Fitz tapped his foot. “I can request a temporary override code from IT, though.”

“You have seven minutes before your next class, Fitz. Are you sure you want to proceed? You did not finish the last few bites of your lunch.”

“I’m sure.”

“Sending a request on your behalf now,” Lume said. “The code should appear temporarily on your office screen.”

“Open up the temp personal portal, please, and I’ll drop the code in there. Go ahead and queue my messenger in the background.”

“The portal is open on your desk.”

Fitz looked at the code on his office screen, reached up and long-pressed the string of numbers and letters. Through his lenses, the code appeared to lift off the screen and stick to his finger. He wagged his finger back and forth to make sure; the code wiggled in sync. The portal field was visible on his desk, obstructing his view of his dinner plate. Fitz drug the code and dropped it into the text field.

“Access granted,” Lume said. “Here is your messaging app.”

“Thanks.” Fitz stared at the log-in screen, his username filled but password field blank. “Looks like it’s logged out for some reason? Do you mind filling the password in?”

“I wish that I could, Fitz. But you enacted a new security protocol last week, granting instant password recall access only to your home network. You said something to the effect, ‘I will not have all of my passwords stolen in the fruit aisle of the grocery.’”

Fitz dropped his head into his hand, hitting the lenses off his nose slightly. He rubbed the bridge of his nose where it’d dug in. He told Lume a password to fill as he replaced the lenses.

“That was your password three passwords ago. Please try again.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You have two minutes until your next class, Fitz. Would you like to complete this process this evening when you have access to all your account information?”

“No, this’ll only take a second.” Fitz tried another password.

“You’ve never used that for this account.”

He let out a long breath, closing his eyes. He tried another. Lume dinged, and Fitz opened his eyes to his messaging inbox. He tapped the air in front of him where the message from HRMNY hovered.

“Confirm my account please, Lume.” Fitz gathered his dinner plate, placing it back into the metal box behind his chair which was cool again. In his lenses, he watched the confirmation option select and shift back to the HRMNY UI. He selected a lengthy password for the new app.

“Can you store this one for me?” Fitz asked.

“Again, you do not have access to your password vault outside your personal network. Would you like to revisit this protocol this evening?”

Fitz chuckled at the friction in every step of this process. “Not necessary. Can you just leave me a note with it listed? Thanks.”

“Unfortunately, as you’re seeing now, your lenses have been locked down due to your assigned lunch period ending. Your class is scheduled to begin… fifteen seconds ago.”

“So I can’t even see what the app actually looks like?”

“That is what I’m saying,” Lume said.

Fitz laughed, and Lume contributed a mechanical chuckle of his own. How ironic that Fitz was not even a HRMNY user yet, and he already acted like an addicted lost cause, showing up to class late trying a hundred ways to get access to it.

He folded his lenses and returned them to their case.

“Although you did not get to experience HRMNY right now, Fitz, it will be waiting for you when you arrive home. You can begin your ‘experiment’ then.”

Despite trying not to, Fitz felt excited by that prospect.

S2

Fitz dropped into his office chair. He winced at the light. “Lume, can you dim those to fifty percent?”

The lights faded as Fitz massaged his temples, trying to rub away the invisible nail protruding from behind his eyes. He reached for the drawer where he kept his lens case but noticed them set atop his desk instead.

“That’s where you left them in a hurry before class this morning,” Lume offered.

Fitz nodded, remembering his quick HRMNY session before class. Since the previous night, he’d become accustomed with its interface and basic concept. No matter how much Lume hounded him, Fitz made sure to be on time for class this morning. Lume was programmed to be particular about deadlines, after all.

“Would you like me to begin playing your lunch playlist, Fitz?”

Fitz rubbed and blinked his eyes repeatedly. “Ah, yes. Thanks.”

The room remained in silence.

“Lume?” Fitz reached for his lens case.

“I typically begin it after you’ve retrieved your dinner plate from the miniature heater. Would you like me to override this preference?”

The lens frames slipped over Fitz’s ears, and he waved a hand in the air, responding to whatever it was Lume said. HRMNY’s interface still floated in before him where he’d left it at the beginning of his first class this morning. The app was interesting. His few minutes with it last night before sleep had shown him while many thought it appealing. He still couldn’t imagine feeling anxiety or physical pain because of separation from it, though.

A wall of sound crashed into his ear drums, yanking him from his thoughts. He felt the office chair tip back far enough that his stomach dropped. He realized the source of the cacophony.

“Lume! Turn the music down!”

“This is the volume you’ve selected as default.”

“It’s way louder than normal, right?” He felt himself speaking with a raised voice.

The music relented slightly.

“A bit more please!”

It lowered significantly to a manageable amount.

“Great, thanks,” Fitz said, motioning to enter HRMNY’s lobby.

“It’s barely audible, Fitz.”

“That’s perfect,” Fitz said.

As the lobby loaded in, he swiveled the chair and reached for his lunch. The latch opened in his hand, the door swinging easily and heat emanating from its interior. He felt the plate in his hands, but he paid more attention on the bar filling up on the right side of his vision, and he accidentally touched a coil under the plate.

He snatched his hand backward, smashing it into the side of his desk and sending a second kind of shooting pain through his fingers and up his forearm. He let out a string of warbled words, some of them not fit for being at work, he was sure.

“I’m compelled to remind you, Fitz, that the contents of the miniature oven are hot.” Lume hummed a few notes of the current nocturne. Was it already the third one in the playlist?

Fitz abandoned the almost full bar long enough to retrieve his plate from the metal box and drop it onto his desk next to the empty lens case. Wheeling his chair to the right, he snapped off the tip of an aloe stalk. He’d never actually used this before today. Carefully, he spread it over his thumb and palm.

While he massaged it dry onto his hand, Fitz checked on top of the heater for his utensils, but they weren’t there. He yanked the right desk drawer open — nothing.

“I do believe you left your knife and fork on your kitchen counter this morning,” Lume said. “Yes, just checked, and they are still sitting there.”

“Couldn’t have reminded me that before now?”

The voice’s slightly mechanical laugh overpowered the nocturne for a moment. “I did twice before you exited your kitchen.”

“Must’ve not heard you,” Fitz muttered, gingerly picking up the entire piece of chicken between two fingers.

He was finally given access to HRMNY’s lobby. “How much time until my next class?” he asked.

“Twenty-nine minutes, officially,” Lume said.

“Get my attention in twenty-four minutes.”

“Are you going to hear me this time?”

“Hmm?” The category selection screen awaited Fitz, and he waved his piece of chicken in the air, rotating through the options.

He didn’t know what mood he was feeling right now. Being on lunch with a class afterward, maybe not something involved. Ethics was out. As was Politics. History and Culture even felt a bit much. Maybe he’d go for something under Entertainment. He could post about movies, right? He didn’t want a lot of newer releases, but he had a working knowledge that would surely keep him engaging long enough.

The queue for the beginning of the match looked shorter than he’d anticipated. I guess there were a lot more people engaging with this category than the few matches he’d completed last night in the more academic sections. He took another bite of chicken. While the queue counted down for the beginning of the match, Fitz quickly answered a series of questions regarding movies and the film industry as a whole. He barely gave a thought to his answers, as they simply prodded about his opinions. Pictures of actors he somewhat recognized flew by as the subject of some questions. It was all nearly a blur. The more questions he could answer, the more accurate his placement would be.

Placement was key.

As the countdown his zeros, both lenses filled with a grid that looked like it consumed the entire office from floor to ceiling. Fitz had to move his head left to right to see the corners of the grid. Seconds later, text appeared instructing him to vote for his family’s banner color for the match. He picked blue like he always picked. The majority of his family members selected yellow apparently because that’s what populated his region of the grid as the match began.

His family was comprised of people from around the world who best matched his survey answers. Most alike individuals were grouped together for matches, and the more in common you had with your family members, the better chance you had for success.

Two words appeared in large letters before his eyes: FIND HARMONY. The vowels in both words faded first, leaving only the consonants. Finally, only the letters in HRMNY lingered in Fitz’s vision before disintegrating, marking the beginning of the match.

The goal was to fill the grid with your family’s color. Fitz quickly swiped from left to right, opening a series of text fields. The top one welcomed him to post his thoughts. So he did. He didn’t have a lot to say, especially for this category, but he filled it anyway. The app allowed him to use his voice to dictate what he wanted to post, but he found typing more comfortable, so he used the virtual keyboard projected onto his desk.

He spent around thirty or forty seconds shooting out statuses. Some of them barely made sense to him, but he tried to keep them generally on topic for the survey. He was able to produce seven statuses, which he was proud of. They appeared in a row below that first text field. His family members should see them in the coming seconds.

Like clockwork, posts from his family began rolling onto his feed. Dozens of them. Dozens of dozens of them. Most of them, he engaged with; some of them he didn’t. If a post looked to have a lot of activity, he tended to send those plusses, which made them perform even better. Posts that lacked attention from his other family members, he let fall away. He didn’t want anyone’s posts to tank, but he also had a limited amount of time to work, and he couldn’t waste it on dead content.

While reacting to his family’s content, he kept an eye on his own posts, which showed plusses appear and float up from them, meaning others were giving him positive reactions. A couple of his posts were lagging behind the others, and he mentally kicked himself for not coming up with something more clever. He knew they’d take within moments.

Before he could scroll again through his family feed, a second feed appeared to its left. This was the community feed. Hundreds upon hundreds of new posts. These were from opposing families, and they presented survey results quite different from his own.

Fitz bolted into motion, reacting with a deftness that surprised him given he’d only spent a few matches within the app to this point. He clicked floating minus options on post after post. While swiping and clicking with his left hand, he controlled the last bit of family posts with his right, giving them the plusses they needed. Giving the minuses on the left feed felt mindless, which made it easier. It was all muscle memory. Swipe, click. He targeted the least popular posts first to force them to tank, then searched for more popular posts by the same user. If he could get multiple posts by the same user to tank, it would eliminate them.

Left hand still flying away at the community feed, Fitz clicked through the UI to bring the grid back to the forefront. Yellow squares were trickling across a wide swath, more than other colors. His own squares, marked by his chosen avatar, were performing extremely well to his surprise. His squares had overtaken ten times their original surface area. He’d never seen that kind of success.

He swiped right to left to bring his posting area atop the grid. It showed all of his content still alive and well. Even the posts he anticipated tanking were performing better than he could have hoped. Much of his family must’ve swooped in after the community barrage to defend it. As long as it netted positive engagement, it would continue to factor toward his square ownership.

Back on the community tab, Fitz returned to his negative reactions with a renewed fervor. HRMNY’s entire UI blipped out of existence before him, leaving him staring ahead at blank office walls. He noticed beads of sweat on his forehead for the first time.

“Lume, what happened?? I was going to win my first match!”

“It appears your lens battery died as it was not charged last night.” Lume said it like it was the most obvious statement in the world.

Fitz pulled them from his face, examining them. “I’ve never forgotten to charge them before bed. Surely that’s not it?”

“I believe you would have charged them before retiring for the night, Fitz, if you had retired for the night.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You stayed up the entire night ‘trying out’ the app. You called it research for class.”

There was no way. He’d only lasted several matches before losing interest, right? “No.”

“Would you like me to recite your screen usage to you?”

Fitz slumped back in his chair. He tried to twist his back far enough to pop, but it never would. He grunted in frustration. As he craned his neck, unsuccessfully forcing it to pop as well, he noticed a dot on his otherwise stark white ceiling. He squinted, trying to determine if it were a bug or something else. He’d never seen a bug inside the university facilities.

“It is time for class to begin, Fitz.”

“I thought I said to get my attention five minutes before class,” he said, only half listening to himself. The speck definitely wasn’t a bug. Must be a new stain.

“I did, and you acknowledged me.”

“Hmm?” Fitz stood, still looking at the spot. Looked mostly black with maybe a hint of dark red. “Can you notify maintenance to check my ceiling?”

“Of course.”

Fitz dropped his lenses into their case, regretting not always having a charger in his office for them. He started for the door.

“Your lunch, Fitz?”

Fitz paused, looking back and seeing his plate of uneaten food for the first time. He was sure he’d already eaten it before starting that match. Confused, he stuffed the plate back into metal box behind his chair.

He headed to class, his eyes fighting to stay open and his stomach announcing to the world that he hadn’t eaten today.

S3

Fitz slipped into his chair, returning from his morning class, the same one that had dared him to try HRMNY. He felt a little more than proud that he could report to them he had not only tried it, but he had become quite good at it. After his first near-win yesterday, he engaged last night after work until he officially won. That win only made him hungry for more wins in various categories. Last night had been successful.

He rolled his neck back and forth, thankful for actual rest last night. Despite engaging with HRMNY for several hours, he made sure Lume hounded him until he put it down for a long night of sleep. He even gave Lume protocol to shut the app down if necessary. See? It was easy to find balance with these social experiences.

“Did you have a good class, Fitz?” Lume asked as Fitz swiped through his lens UI. Had he put the lenses on before he’d returned to his office?

“It went well, yes. We discussed — in a basic survey, of course — Mead’s Mind, Self and Society and his behaviorism philosophy. Have you looked into those writings?”

“Reviewing it all now, and we can discuss later.” Lume stopped themselves, as if realizing they didn’t mean to actually respond to that. “Fitz, you realize you did not attend class, correct?”

Fitz continued to swipe through the windows floating in front of his eyes. Articles billing themselves as proven strategies for more visceral and better performing posts in HRMNY. He’d be the judge of that. Had Lume said something?

“Oh, yes that’s right,” Fitz forced. “Wasn’t feeling well, remember?”

“Were you just upset that you weren’t finding harmony at all this morning?”

Fitz chuckled. “Maybe a little. I was just on such a roll last night that I’m not sure what changed this morning. My posting is so much better than my first few matches. It’s laughable, actually.”

Lume gave a sarcastic machine laugh.

“Thanks,” Fitz muttered.

“I believe your students would have enjoyed your thoughts on George Herbert Mead. It is a shame your class was unable to meet today.”

Activating the HRMNY app, Fitz glanced up and noticed the foot-wide dark spot on his otherwise start white ceiling. Was that bigger than yesterday? He couldn’t remember.

“Did you notify maintenance about the ceiling?”

“I did, yes. I keep my commitments.”

“How about laying it on thirty percent less thick?”

“Sorry.”

Fitz knew they weren’t sorry.

Upon entering the HRMNY UI, Fitz stared at a new message. An announcement from the developers. Because of his recent success across the number of matches he’d engaged in, Fitz unlocked a new mode to play in. Unfiltered. The single word floated in front of his face, inviting him to enter. Fitz selected the word without a second thought.

The same type of survey greeted him as before. Nothing different so far.

“What about your lunch, Fitz?”

“Not hungry.” He muttered. “Don’t feel well, remember?”

His survey complete, the UI shifted to show him the same grade as any other match. A new line of instructions floating before his eyes, however. Dismantle opposing posts with words. Comments are available to you in this mode. Use them to find harmony.

While trying to process that information, the match began, Fitz’s hands flying through motions he’d honed over forty-eight hours. Even if he weren’t the fastest, he was precise and efficient. Almost without thought, he produced eighteen posts which posted to his family members’ feeds. When their content reached his eyes, he noticed minor differences in his reply options. Instead of the simple plus symbol, another text field hovered beneath their content.

He pressed the field, and typed: Great point. Before he could submit the message, it highlighted red with an accompanying annotation. This comment would assist the post more if it were more enthusiastic. Unengaging replies are weighted the same as negative ones.

Fitz furrowed his brow. Not enthusiastic enough? This was always how he complimented others. From his view, the post brought up a great point, so that’s exactly what he said. No embellishment, no hyperbole. How could he make it fit what the app was looking for?

He typed: This is an amazing point. He stared at a yellow highlight with an annotation instructing him to be more engaging. This was taking way too much time. With the simple click reactions, he was able to fly through his feed efficiently, but a bout of anxiety swept through his gut as he began feeling behind. To save time, he swiped away the keyboard and switched to audio responses.

“This is one of the best points I’ve ever seen,” Fitz said in a rush.

The moment he saw the green highlight, he submitted the response. If that’s what they wanted, that’s what he would give them. He slide through his feed, dictating his responses to each post, using words like greatest and best and perfect more than he probably had his entire life. He received green highlight after green highlight, so he dared not complain.

Driven by the internal clockwork created from muscle memory, Fitz anticipated the community feed to appear moments before it did. Just like his family content, these posts asked for worded responses.

He targeted the first post he found with low engagement. “Try again,” he instructed.

A red highlight coated the words as they appeared in the text field. Again, an instructive message floated next to them, guiding his performance. Your responses to opposing members should resonate.

Fitz thought for a moment, considering how he spoke to his family’s posts moments before. “This is the worst take I’ve seen today,” he offered.

Yellow highlight. The more personal your feedback, the more it resonates.

“You’re pathetic,” Fitz rushed. The green highlight only appeared on the UI for a fraction of a second before he submitted it.

Fitz leaned forward, placing an arm against his stomach. The room took a lap in his vision, and he paused to collect himself. He swallowed the small amount of saliva he could, suppressing the substantial sudden pain in his gut.

One arm pressed against his stomach, he pressed on. Swiping through more low-engagement responses, he spoke directive feedback to each. He rarely spoke about the post itself or the opinion tied to it; those responses only resulted in red or yellow highlights. He kept his responses short and meaningless, focusing on the people behind the words. That’s where the results were.

Thankfully, over time, the pain in his gut subsided. Or he just didn’t feel it anymore.

As with the regular version of the app, Fitz stored the quick and repetitive motions in his muscle memory, and after several minutes, he felt efficient at this Unfiltered mode of HRMNY as well.

He watched as blue squares — his family’s current color — populated the grid with impressive rapidity. The reds, greens, yellows, purples were no contest for his content or his offensive response strategy. In the moment, the pain in his gut was a forgotten memory replaced by the pride of a match engaged to near perfection, even despite his early learning curve.

Blue filled the grid, triggering a victory flourish. You Found Harmony faded into his view as the blue grid exploded around him. Fitz jumped in his seat, never ready for that despite the number of victories he had experienced the last couple days.

As the sounds of his victory died away, Fitz heard the memorable musical tones of a Chopin nocturne. His attention was drawn back to the office he’d forgotten he sat in. When had he made his way to the office?

“Congratulations,” Lume said, voice modulation flat.

“Thanks, I didn’t expect to win that mode on my first try. It took me forever to find my first harmony in the original.”

“I do remember that. It seems so long ago, does it not?”

Fitz stifled a groan, pressing his hand to the top of his gut, just underneath his ribcage.

“You will not be attending your post-lunch class then?” Lume asked.

Fitz cycled through his efficiency statistics from the last match and compared them to his overall scores. “I still don’t feel the best,” he said, conducting his way through the UI to queue for another match.

He thought it might be the only thing at the moment to distract him from the sharpening pain in his stomach.

S4

Fitz Jefferson felt around the air for the arms of his office chair and lowered himself into it with care. The grid floating in front of his eyes was filling in his favor despite the poor performance from his own content. His family was saving this match for him. Not only were they overtaking the other grid colors, but they were keeping Fitz in the match with their defensive responses on his posts. As long as his content stayed positive by half a percent, he could stay in the match and be useful.

And he needed more than anything to stay in this match. It would be his tenth victory in a row, which unlocked one of the more prestigious badges in the app, he’d discovered. In fact, he had only seen two other users display it on their avatar the entire time he’d engaged with HRMNY. There were even rumors going around that the badge actually lent you more influence in your post responses, both to your family and to others. Seemed too powerful an advantage to squander it.

A one-note tone notified him of an incoming private message. Opening his inbox, Fitz saw the new message appear above the half dozen older threads. You could direct message users in the same match, regardless of what family they belonged to. This message was actually from a user from an opposing family.

Professor J?

Fitz’s stomach dropped. Wait what?”

It’s Kaden from your Wednesday morning class. We missed you yesterday!

He was in a match with one of his students?! How’d he know that Fitz was in the match? Fitz rubbed his forehead and groaned. In the account setup, it asked him if he wanted to connect it to his messaging account, and Fitz didn’t realize it pulled his profile avatar over as well. Of course a student would recognize him.

“Yes, sorry I couldn’t make it to class yesterday. It’s good to see you.”

I’m sorry for what I’m about to do, prof. Don’t fail me, ha!

Before Fitz could ask what the young man meant, another tone alerted in his ear, this one sounding more urgent. He swiped the inbox to the side and brought up his content feed. One by one, his posts were swinging from net positive to net negative feedback. And the culprit on each one was the same: the username which had messaged him moments before appeared as the most recent comment. Fitz looked aghast at the content of the comments, taken aback by their complex obscenity. They weren’t just crass, but they were ugly in a way that Fitz could only describe as expert.

As the last of his posts highlighted red, the colors on the grid began fading to gray. The words which he had seen so often his first couple days engaging with the app grew in size before his face: HARMONY LOST.

“No!” The word slipped from Fitz’s mouth before he could stop it. “NO!”

In the same way, the string of words which followed also flooded from Fitz’s mouth, untamed — uncontrolled. He pieced together disgusting words, some he’d used before but many he hadn’t. He hadn’t even known some of the words before engaging with HRMNY. But they poured from within him, crescendoed out of him, boiled from the heat of his rage.

He’d bolted from his char at some point in the tirade cursing, his chair clattering into the metal box behind him before both crashing to the white tiled floor.

He felt his fists flailing, striking his desk, switching to the nearest wall, swinging at the air itself. The more words which spewed from him, the sharper the pain in his gut forced itself into Fitz’s consciousness. The fog with which he masked the pain was eroded with each primal belch of hatred toward the user which had ejected him from the match.

That user.

That... his student.

Fitz placed a hand over his mouth, pleading with his body not to vomit. His ears still rang from the climax of his breakdown. Who did Fitz think he was? What had given him the right to say those things, to even think those things?

He ripped the lenses from his face and let them rattle against his desk, landing with the stems reaching up. For the second time in five minutes, something overtook Fitz. He acted without thought, without restraint. His hands swiped the aloe vera plant to the side and gripped each side of the Riverside Shakespeare tome. Knuckles burning, he brought the volume down with a shocking thud against the lenses. He did it again. The desk reverberated from the blows.

Again.

The room echoed with the repeated thuds.

Again.

The sound of snapping plastic and crunching glass pierced through the ringing in Fitz’s ears.

Again.

A guttural roar accompanied this swing, bellowing from deep within the sharp pain plaguing him. As the oversized book struck the desk, another cracking sound invaded the rest of the cacophony, this one from above Fitz. He looked up in time to see the stain in his ceiling, nearly six feet in diameter now, give way and produce a waterfall of rusty black sludge.

It poured onto Fitz’s desk for several seconds, splattering to all corners of the room and coating most of Fitz’s torso and chest in the process. As the sludge descended, Fitz’s light-projected work screen flickered on and off, flashing in and out of visibility within the oily liquid. Before it blinked out for good, Fitz saw in its right corner that he had dozens of unchecked text and audio messages.

The sludge waterfall slowed to a consistent drip. Fitz stood motionless before his desk, sludge caking much of his clothes and dripping into his shoes from the edges of the desk. While his body shivered and trembled, his breathing was steady. Surprising.

The faintest final notes of a Chopin nocturne floated by his ears.

“Fitz?” The faceless voice of Lume.

“What?”

“Do you feel better?”

The laugh began in the lowest parts of his belly and burst through his chest, throat, and mouth. Equaling the force of the black waterfall from moments before, Fitz’s laughter spilled from him into the office.

He did feel better.