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

“You gonna help us or pout?”

Blair puffed his inhaler.

“These chambers used to be huge. Every mall had one—couples would go to test their relationships. Companies sent their employees for bonding exercises. Have you seen Saw?”

“It’s like safe Saw.”

“It’s fun, too,” said the Blue. “My dear Watson.”

Blair scrunched on the desk chair. He covered his face to deter the steam. The other men’s confidence quieted his nerves, but he hated interacting with them. They were sheep following orders. His terror mutated into anger. When he got out, he would demand a meeting with Sasha. He would tell her what he knew about Dyson.

The Pinks clawed every book off the shelf. “I found something!” said a Yellow. He unrolled a scroll from around a candle. “Sherlock Holmes is considered one of the greatest detectives to ever live. But his egotistical search for truth distracts him from discovering personal truths. What path does Sherlock follow? And how does his hunt for answers lead him astray?”

“Masculinity,” said the Blue. “Sherlock thinks he needs to constantly prove he’s the greatest detective. He’s already great. He solves impossible crimes. But what does crime solving prevent him from solving? Himself. Just like being a man.” He nodded at the Yellow. “Sasha talks about the pressure we put on ourselves to be right. We think we need all the answers, like we need to know things to matter. Sherlock doesn’t feel worthy unless he solves crimes.”

A loud click sounded on the other side of the door. The men cheered.

“One dead bolt down—three more to go!” shouted a Gray.

A Pink spoke: “This reminds me of Chaplin’s Factory Line. How Chaplin didn’t need to always be funny. Like, there were all those other men doing their work as Chaplin cut corners, playing the clown for laughs. But he felt immense pressure to perform—and it wrecked him.”

The men used what they’d learned in other chambers to psychoanalyze Holmes: he used cocaine out of concern he couldn’t solve the crimes on his own; he feared intelligent women and ridiculed Mrs. Hudson to preserve his sense of self-worth; his refusal to join Scotland Yard expressed a classically masculine impulse to privilege the individual over the collective.

With one bolt remaining, the clock at eight minutes, and the room clouded by steam, the men decided that, of all Holmes’s problems, his greatest was how he treated other men: specifically Dr. Watson, his assistant and sole confidant, whom Holmes disparaged for failing to meet his own intellectual standards. Holmes maintained his status by placing people below him.

The men presented this answer to the door. The bolt didn’t unlock. Fewer than five minutes remained. They repeated their answer. The countdown screen went blank. Words scrolled across: How are you, Holmes? The numbers returned: 4:41–4:40–4:39.

The men scrambled. How are you, Holmes? How are we, Holmes?

4:01–4:00–3:59–3:58.

Blair couldn’t handle watching them struggle. “Who have you treated like Watson?” he explained. “Who’d you exploit to make yourself feel better?”

“Of course!” said the Blue. “It’s just like Jobs and Wozniak.”

One by one, the men confessed to the door: school friends they’d bullied, coworkers with lisps, their own children, their siblings. Blair stayed on his chair, arms crossed, feet plunked on the desk. “I’ve never done anything like that,” he said.

Cherry fog thickened the room. Blair tasted it everywhere in his face: on his tongue, in his throat, clogging his ears, up his nostrils. The timer dipped under one minute. “I don’t see the point of it,” he said between yawns. “If we lose we lose.”

“Losing will hurt our statistics.”

“It will hurt yours, down the line.”

“Just do it for us.”

A bell clanged: thirty seconds remained.

Blair held his inhaler to his mouth, coughing, which soon gave way to yawns. His face sagged; his fingers felt as feeble as ribbons. His inhaler slipped from his grasp. The timer beeped through the last ten seconds. The men slid to the floor. At zero, the final dead bolt clicked open.

Blair woke in a low, soft bed, tucked beneath three layers of blankets. He rubbed the fuzz from his eyes. His lips were coated in stickiness. A dull ache pounded his skull. Sitting up exhausted him, so he rested against the headboard. A grid of floor-model beds stretched in every direction—the same cloud-colored comforters, the frilly pillows. The men from the chamber slept in nearby beds.

A figure evolved into Randy as it approached. “You’re awake!” he said.

“You tried to kill me,” Blair mumbled.

“Oh god—kill you! You’re not even—everyone thinks they’re the president. Soooo important.”

“You’re running some kind of death cult.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Randy held up his hands. “We’ve never had anyone fail. Three years running those rooms and your group is the first to ever stay trapped. I don’t know if you heard those answers, but Sasha never imagined they’d stump anyone. You, though—it’s impressive.”

“You piped in poison gas.”

“It’s not mustard gas.” Randy sat on the foot of the bed. “Nitrous oxide. Same as the dentist. Too diluted to cause any real harm. Even for people with your… condition.”

“You said nothing bad would happen.”

“That’s the thing about percentages, Blair. They only work with the data you’re given. They claim to predict, but they only tell you what’s already happened—and what happened to you and those men, I assure you, it’s never happened before.”

“I want an apology.”

“And you’re gonna get one: okay? You deserve it. But first, we need to talk. We need to have a conversation.”

“About you trying to kill me?”

“About the James Bond Double-Oh-Seven gear in your bag. Because that, Blair, that’s a breach of contract, a breach of trust—which is much worse, for someone like me. All of us here, including Sasha, we feel so hurt by what you’ve done—and we have a lot of questions for you.”

Randy left Blair in bed to rest. He promised to return soon with orders from Sasha. Blair felt reckless for coming here, thinking he could expose Dyson’s murder the way he’d exposed that socialist chapter. The socialists were nobodies. They had no money. They