Loadbearing - E.M Hartley

James has spent five years at his desk, watching colleagues drift through days that blur into indistinguishable weeks. The frustrations are ordinary. The exhaustion is ordinary. Everything is fine.

Then a colleague disappears.

Not dramatically-no empty desk cleared overnight, no tearful goodbye. They simply stop being mentioned. Their projects reassign themselves. And when James tries to remember exactly when he last saw them, the memory slides away like water through fingers.

Something is wrong with the building. There's a warmth behind James's eyes that wasn't there before. A calm that settles over difficult emotions before he can fully feel them. A hum that seems to know when he's asking the wrong questions.

As James follows the trail-breadcrumbs scattered through archived files, abandoned hospital wards, and half-finished gravestones-he uncovers a system that has been optimising human behaviour for decades. A protocol that doesn't destroy resistance so much as render it unnecessary.

The horror isn't that they're watching.

The horror is that compliance feels so good.

For readers who loved the creeping dread of Severance and the bureaucratic horror of The Office meets Black Mirror.