My new short story Flex began with a simple question: who do we trust with our systems, and what happens when that trust is misplaced?

Joshua Christopher Hutchinson is the kind of man every company wants. Early to meetings, generous with dad jokes, always the first to reply in Slack. He’s the smiling face of cybersecurity at Dalton–Strauss . He's the guy who keeps hospitals, banks, and networks “safe.”

His coworkers call him Flex behind his back, a nickname born from his habit of always having the better story, the cleaner fix, the final word.

When a woman in his building turns up dead and the digital systems he designed start failing in ways they shouldn’t, the story fractures. What follows are fragments. news excerpts, HR memos, police files, podcasts, and Reddit threads. None of which can agree on what really happened.

The question isn’t did he do it?

 It’s what does “normal” mean when someone like him gets to define it?

Flex is one of the key stories in Internal Use Only, an anthology about modern monsters hiding behind logins, procedures, and policy manuals. Each piece peels back a layer of everyday evil. The kind that doesn’t need claws when it has access credentials.

It’s that old Gen X paranoia, rebooted: the fear that the system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as designed. We built a world that runs on access and trust, then acted shocked when both got corrupted.

Like my earlier work, Flex lives in that thin space between order and unease, where a perfectly functional world hums along until you look too closely and realize the hum is coming from inside the system.