The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (digital ebook reader txt) 📕

Roger provided housing for employees, too. The best education imaginable for their children, delivered by competitively compensated teachers. There were lawns for pets to roam. Running trails. A quarry for children to swim in—including a safe but no less exciting water slide that spelled DAM. Movie theater. Bowling. Buses to the city on weekends. And a four-hundred-mile-long steel wall surrounding the DAM property to protect against encroaching fires.

“DAM isn’t a corporation,” he said. “It’s the future of life in America. People need to come together. I hate how fractured we all are, always at each other’s throats. The problem is not that we hate each other—and I truly believe, deep down, it’s impossible to hate someone once you understand them—the problem is communication. No one communicates. They’d rather troll and drag and call out and harass and cancel. It’s painful. And my industry is the problem—tech companies killed communication, with social media, texting, apps that tell you when to express your love for someone. At DAM we want to bring communication to life. Like Lazarus.”

“Which would make you Jesus.”

“Which makes all of us Jesus.” He laughed. “DAM is a team.”

“I don’t even know what you make,” I said.

“We make the world safer.” He gave me a steely, blink-less look of self-importance meant to impress me. I regret that it worked.

Dyson’s promise to make the world safer had ended with Peter and three other men dead, with Leon Cranch curled up in a jail cell, with the dissolution of my oldest friendship. “But how?” I asked Roger. “Your website says you offer ‘Preventative Atonement.’ That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Ours is an era of impatience. Investors value potential over product. According to Forbes, Bloomberg, and Barron’s, DAM has the potential to fundamentally alter how we talk to each other over the coming decade. Silicon Valley has never seen potential like ours. No investor wants to be late to the party. And the party?” He checked his watch. “Starts in eight days.”

We returned to the office beneath the helipad. I was pummeled with titles and names.

“María Hernandez,” said María Hernandez. “Head of outreach technology.” She was a short, dark-haired woman wearing chunky heels and a loose tunic the color of sand. The gold bracelets ringing her wrists tinged as she led me to a corner of the room so close to the forest branches scraped the glass. “Sasha, I don’t know if they’ve told you—and forgive me if you’ve heard this already. But you’re a real inspiration. The integrity and strength you showed, after all you’ve been through, it just—” She thumbed a tear from her eye. “I admire you so much.”

“It was a very difficult time,” I said.

“You were my first choice from the beginning. We all respect you at DAM—but me more than anyone else. I know you’ll do amazing work for us.”

There were questions I should have been asking: What work? Why did you pick me? Why the hell does everyone here look so happy? But María’s enthusiasm blotted out my concerns. I collected her praise like a bee gathering pollen.

She sat me down in a deep leather chair facing a flat-screen TV. She capped headphones over my ears. A promotional video played:

Four white women sit around a small outdoor table in the courtyard of a crowded restaurant, sharing mimosas. A voice-over says: There used to be a time when we could speak freely. The women clink their glasses. One woman says, This mimosa is my spirit animal. The other women laugh—one spit-takes her drink. The first woman photographs herself holding her drink. There used to be a time when our communities supported us. Understood us. Beneath her photo, she types her joke, then posts. There used to be a time when we looked out for each other. Her phone buzzes and chimes on the table. She coyly ignores it.

My god, Shelly, you’re blowing up.

What’re they saying?

Are you faaaamous?

Shelly gasps when she picks up her phone.

What’s wrong, Shelly?

What happened?

They’re saying I’m… I don’t want to say it.

Comments like RACIST and COLONIZER and UGH WHITE WOMEN and UR CANCELED SHELLY MAGUIRE flow over the screen. But major shifts in technology and the expansion of communities have drastically changed how we interact.

You know I’m not like that, says Shelly. It was a joke.

Pretty tasteless, says one of her friends.

I would never have posted it.

You can’t take risks with comments like that.

A montage follows Shelly through weeks of isolation, crying in her shower, getting fired, dumped, her friends ignoring her calls. It concludes in the restaurant where it started. Shelly, with deep bags under her eyes and frazzled hair, sits alone in the corner, glaring at the table where her former friends currently sit and refuse to look at her.

The video cuts to footage inside a technology lab. Employees type on laptops and mark figures on enormous touch screens. There used to be a time when no one got hurt. But those days are over. Employees hugging in hallways. Footage of a verdant forest and children swimming in a quarry. But some of us still have faith in humanity. Some of us still believe in the value of teamwork and are working to ensure the prosperity of our communities for generations to come. Mixed-race friends walk down the sidewalk, laughing and licking ice-cream cones. A puppy licks the face of a child. Introducing DAM. A revolutionary new technology that shows users how their words will be interpreted by people outside their communities. DAM uses advanced algorithms to simulate over four hundred billion possible outcomes for whatever you might post online. We all make mistakes. But what if we can atone for our mistakes before making them? A series of bars rise and fall on various graphs. They shift in color from green to purple to orange to red—the screen blinks as if indicating a nuclear strike. DAM’s risk analysis summary provides users with a full overview of how their words might be interpreted. Once risk is determined, users complete a multi-step confirmation