Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (10 page)

Martin sent an instant message to his boss in California asking if she knew anything about it. She responded that she couldn’t say. Having a boss in another city had its advantages and its disadvantages. The advantages were obvious, and the downside was the lack of personal connection. He couldn’t go look her in the eye. His group was spread out all over different locations in the company. Downsizings always came from the other locations and never from the California office. The company thought remote leadership was a good idea. Martin’s experience indicated that the managers did not agree.

Next he went to send an instant message to Alice, but her status read, “Out of the office until Wednesday.” That was too much of a coincidence. She knew something but couldn’t say what, so she was ducking everyone. Martin tried Wesley, but he was logged off. It wasn’t quite five yet, but Martin closed everything down and went home regardless, taking his briefcase with him. It was going to be a long weekend.

☼

Martin drove straight back to his apartment. He had found the apartment on short notice when he was hired and moved to town. There hadn’t been much of a choice then, but at the time it hadn’t concerned him because he could find a better place later. He never did. It was a place to sleep and only a short drive to work. He had a memory foam mattress, a big TV, a game console, a desk with a nice computer, and the fastest Internet connection possible. The rest of his furniture was Spartan and cheap. He had almost nothing on the walls, only a couple of movie posters he enjoyed because they were so bad. It was not that he didn’t appreciate art; he just didn’t buy any. Wesley found it amusing. He called it a cave with furniture.

Martin stared into his fridge awhile and then into his freezer for a spell, like a bear in a stream waiting for a salmon to jump. He finally reached out a paw, grabbed a frozen potpie, and put it in the microwave. While his pastry-sicle basked in radiation like a debutant at the tanning salon, he opened his briefcase on the kitchen bar. He didn’t have a table.

After making sure his hands were clean and dry, he pulled out one of the images of Millicent Able. He studied the image more closely than he had at work. It was extremely realistic and detailed, but with the unmistakable hand of an artist. He had always enjoyed art on an intellectual level, for its technical mastery, and its originality, or its ability to convey a message. This was different; it drew him in and wouldn’t let go. Perhaps this is what they felt when someone said that a piece of art spoke to them. Her eyes would not let him go. The microwave’s plaintive beep broke his reverie.

He pulled his dinner from the oven to stop the machine’s complaints. He dumped the pie out of its handy microwavable container onto one of his chipped plates, grabbed a hard cider from the fridge, and sat back down at the counter. While he waited for the pie to cool down, he searched the Internet to see about getting the image printed on something that would last longer than copier paper. At the moment anyway, he felt that this was a piece of art he would admire forever. He found a site that would take an uploaded image and print it using archival inks and paper.

When he had finished eating, he cleaned up and went to his desk. He pulled out his scanner, cleaned the glass, and scanned the image at the highest resolution possible. He opened the image in Photoshop and zoomed in as far as it went. It was no longer possible to tell what part of the picture he was looking at. The image appeared to be constructed out of individually placed specks of toner dust. He couldn’t image how anyone could have done that. In the arrangement of the dots he saw patterns, not mechanical moiré patterns but hatching, cross-hatching, and whimsical swirly patterns. The patterns looked familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on where he might have seen them. The markings blended to a nearly photographic image when he zoomed out to the actual size. He cropped out the text and resized the image to be as large as the site would print. The image still retained the resolution recommended by the website for optimal quality. He ordered the largest print possible.

He ran a Google image search but didn’t get a match. It was black and white, so he didn’t think it would match a color version of the same image. He tried it with a search for a grey-scale version of his own profile picture. No hit. It occurred to him that maybe Millie’s Facebook page might still be out there. He recalled seeing a graph of when there would be more profiles of dead people than live people. With some trepidation, he searched for and found it.

He went to Millicent Able’s page, the girl whose picture he had lifted from the box of her belongings. In the corner was a tiny color version of the selfie in the copier image. His stomach dropped. The image was out there for someone to get and plant. But he couldn’t imagine how anyone used this tiny jpeg to craft the work of art in toner dust on the copier glass. Still, it planted a seed of doubt and made him uneasy. He looked through her Facebook, hoping to learn something more about her. There wasn’t much there, at least not that was public. The only pictures posted were of a cat. The profile contained only the minimum of information. That was disappointing but not unexpected. Alice had said that she kept to herself.

His search to learn more about Millie had come to a dead end, so he decided to see what he could find out about ghosts in general. He started with Wikipedia. He found a lot of information about the terminology, beliefs about them throughout history, and how they were viewed by different cultures and religions. The section on the scientific view however, was brief and consisted of scientific debunking of sightings such as: hallucinations caused by various things, optical illusions, solar activity, magnetic fields, and carbon monoxide poisoning. Martin’s favorite rationalization was pareidolia. Pareidolia—the mind’s tendency to find familiar patterns in random things, such as finding Jesus’ picture in a piece of toast or a human face in a rock formation on Mars.

The wiki’s science section did not contain a single theory positing that ghosts were the spirits of dead people. Perhaps such things were a matter of faith and not science. He wondered if there were any theories that just didn’t pass muster in the Wikipedia editors’ eyes. Science, by its nature, frowns on things until there is reproducible, empirical evidence to support them. As the aphorism goes, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

He broadened his search. He found all sorts of sites with references to ghosts. The List of Top 10 Ghosts included Casper. There were sites dedicated to ghosts that were full of video clips, pictures of “actual” sightings, and personal accounts of “true” ghost stories. Some were obviously exploitive, covered with ads for ghost related t-shirts and other trinkets, ghost repellant wards, psychics, exorcists, ghost hunting gear, ghost tours, and books on ghosts and ghost hunters. In search of wider readership, some sites took the shotgun approach and the section on ghosts was but a small part of a larger site dedicated to all kinds of paranormal phenomena like palm reading and numerology. Others were the amateurish sites of earnest true believers dedicated to informing the public.

Martin supposed he had no right to be cynical since he was becoming a true believer himself. He skimmed all but the most egregious, looking for something more than the folklore he already knew. He discovered descriptions of different kinds of ghosts and a crowdfunding project for an EMF gadget that worked with an iPhone app. “Always have your iGhost, when you need it most!” was the motto. He found a site with detailed instructions on how to capture ghosts along with severe admonishments that this should be left to professionals.

He found descriptions of the different reasons for ghosts to be hanging around, as if the writer understood a spirit’s motivation. Was Millie here on unfinished business, because she didn’t know she’d died, or just to say hi? He read several descriptions of how ghosts were attached to things or locations. This fit with Millie’s desire to sit in her chair and look out the window. Was she “attached” to her ergonomic chair? Martin wasn’t attached to his.
The stupid piece of junk.

This lead him to pause a moment. If Millie were somehow attached to her cubicle, what would happen if someone moved into it? Would she be chased away or turn violent or something? He needed to keep her cubicle unoccupied. They might hire someone to take her place and seat them there. He doubted that would happen since there wasn’t much hiring these days; everyone still employed had to suck it up whenever someone left. Being by the window was a desirable location however. Someone might have enough pull to get moved into it. He didn’t, but someone might. He didn’t have any ideas, so he pushed the problem to the back burner to let it simmer in his subconscious while he continued his research.

There were many sites that used the fact that ghosts were mentioned in the Bible as proof of their existence. Even more postings refuted that claim with verses and arguments that ghosts were demons impersonating dead loved ones. After wading through virtual piles of similar stuff, he came upon a concept that began to resonate with him. The concept of auras was, of course, familiar to him, but he hadn’t thought about it much. There were writings about auras, Chakras, and Life Energy Fields. Many of these posts advocated that ghosts were these auras persisting after the body. They proposed these fields were also an explanation of Out-Body-Experiences and Astral Projection with ties to many other paranormal abilities and phenomenon.

The notion of a Life Energy Field brought to mind the recently verified existence of the Higgs Field. The Higgs Field is the mechanism by which mass is conferred on particles which would otherwise be massless. This field has not been measured, only the disturbance in it which manifests as a particle named the Higgs boson. Much to the chagrin of proper physicists, the media referred to the particle as the God Particle. Perhaps ghosts existed as a disturbance in some other undetectable field. Was there a connection between the ancient notion of auras and modern physics? If the notion occurred to him, he figured someone had addressed it. He searched for: quantum theory and ghosts.

He found more than he thought he would. There were books and papers by physicists that read more like philosophy than science. They spoke of the wave/particle duality, about the Observer Effect, about the famous double slit experiment, and how the act of observation changes the outcome, unbounded by the limitations of the speed of light. They proposed that this is evidence that consciousness creates reality. Some went so far as to state that consciousness is the only reality and that a cosmic consciousness is the basis for existence. Could a person’s aura be a ripple in the cosmic consciousness, as a Higgs boson is disturbance in the Higgs field? In his cursory reading, he didn’t find any of the proponents of this theory stating that a consciousness persisted after death of the body. It seemed like an obvious consequence to him.

He found many more books and articles refuting these claims than there were supporting them. That didn’t sway Martin because the majority of astronomers repudiated Copernicus’s theories in his day. It grew late. The physics got to be beyond his comprehension. The arguments were more like medieval philosophers debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin than science. Reading the stuff made him drowsy, so he shut down his computer and went to bed.

☼

He walked down a long hallway. Alice poked her head out a side door, smiled and said, “Martin, come see this.” He followed her through the door. Once on the other side of the door, they were in an elevator. It dinged and descended, while an instrumental version of “Blackbird” played in the background. Alice smiled and hummed along.

The elevator door opened into a room filled with exotic electronics and people in white lab coats. Martin walked up to a large shuttered window in the center of the back wall. It opened. On the other side of the glass two streams of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light collided. He didn’t question how he knew what he was watching, he just knew. He saw particles spinning and corkscrewing off in all different directions. Their brightly colored trails somehow contained more colors than there were words for. As he watched the swirling hues, he began to notice they vaguely defined a shape. When he recognized that the shape was a human figure, it coalesced into the image of Millicent Able holding a small paper plate with a piece of birthday cake on it. She offered him the slice of cake. Then the shutters closed again with a startling bang.

The human soul weighs 21 grams, smells like grilled vegetables, looks like a wrinkled tartan quilt, and sounds like bridge traffic.

—
From
Welcome to Night Vale
by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor