“Shucked” by Adrian Joyce

An office, at three in the morning, somewhere in the UK (probably the City); an IT guy, testing some updates to the the company email system, half-asleep; spam messages spilling out into other systems, scrolling across the coffee machine display, corrupting security camera captions, unnoticed; and then spreading, somehow, out into the world; a dark doglike thing breaking into the office, absorbing or changing the man that gets in his way, hunting down the source. It has the sense of a nightmare: a brief, enigmatic, effective slice of techno-horror. Not bad for a first outing.