Veritas

VeritasCallum moderates the worst of the internet so the rest of us don't have to. Scroll. Flag. Delete. Move on. Never engage. He's been good at his job for six years. He's also been empty for just as long. Then, buried in a forgotten server, he finds an image that shouldn't still exist: a framed print of something half-shadow, half-man. A caption that reads like a warning. He is watching. He has been waiting.
He should delete it. He saves it instead. What follows isn't a haunting. It's an algorithm - learning him, feeding him, becoming him, one scroll at a time. The mirror in his dark phone screen starts showing him something standing behind his own reflection. And the longer he looks, the less certain he is which one of them is real. Veritas is old horror in a new container: a werewolf story for the feed age, where the beast isn't cursed by the moon - it's built by the algorithm, and it's already inside the glass.
A one sitting read. A long lasting memory.