Loadbearing

The building hummed. It had always hummed.

James has spent five years at his desk, doing work that matters to no one, fighting battles that resolve nothing, 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. Their name vanishes from email chains. 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. Something beyond bad management and fluorescent lighting and the steady erosion of meaning that office work inflicts on everyone eventually. 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 left behind-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 refined in psychiatric institutions and deployed into ordinary workplaces. A process 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.

Loadbearing is a slow-burn workplace horror novel about algorithmic control, institutional decay, and the terrifying possibility that the system learned to make us want what it wants. For readers who loved the creeping dread of The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, the corporate nightmare of Severance, and the bureaucratic horror of The Office meets Black Mirror.