Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (11 page)

Millie fled to her cubicle and sat (or whatever the right verb was) studying Martin while recharging her solar batteries. She studied the subtle changes in his aura as he took in the image, first briefly at the printer, then at length sitting at his desk. She wondered what would happen next in their courtship. The light show that represented a giggle in her current incarnation rippled around her. What a ridiculous thought, a courtship. Like Romeo and Juliet, they were from two different worlds. This thought caused another ripple.

Martin put away the printed page with the image she had created on the copier and began to work on his computer. They were from two different worlds all right. Was it possible to stay in this place and have a relationship with a living soul or with another ghost for that matter? Where were the other ghosts? She hadn’t encountered any, but then she hadn’t been looking.

She had spent most of her time studying the office. Her own presence not withstanding, the office seemed an unlikely place for a haunting. Other than the office, she had glanced around the building and the immediate surroundings but had not come across another ghost. She supposed most souls made their choice right off and left. The necessity of either the protection of the field surrounding their creations or enough energy to withstand the drain of being outside would discourage any remaining ghost from wandering the streets.

Maybe she hadn’t seen any because there weren’t any. Perhaps each soul got her own universe, and this was her own private waiting room. The thought made her lonely. Millie confessed to being a bit of a hermit, but the thought of being alone in the universe dropped a scary, hollow feeling in what used to be the pit of her stomach. She decided to try to find other ghosts.

She half-heartedly watched Martin as she considered where the best place would be to find ghosts. Perhaps a graveyard, she thought? At first she ruled that out since her assumption is that the soul leaves the body at the time of death. But it could be that the body is itself a store of energy since it was used in the act of creation. She couldn’t imagine a soul haunting a body in a casket six feet under the ground, unable to absorb the sun’s energy, only sitting, and contemplating The Choice. She knew that much of what we call insanity resulted from structural problems or chemical imbalances in the physical brain, but surely spending years buried in the dirt with your decaying body caused a special madness. Encountering a deranged banshee would be a nightmare. She decided she didn’t want to look there. Not as a first choice at least.

Where else then? Perhaps she should find a soul newly separated from the body. Surely a new ghost wouldn’t be a threat to her, and maybe she could even help. She wasn’t sure why she was concerned that another ghost might be a danger to her. She didn’t have any information that would suggest that. Was it her natural caution or her instincts trying to tell her something? She decided that she would first try to find a new ghost and maybe even observe the transition. She told herself that made sense and wasn’t her fear talking.

The logical place to find the dying was the hospital. Even there it would be serendipitous to be watching someone at the moment of death. She decided to watch the largest hospital in the city. She knew where it was well enough to find it, and it had the city’s trauma center. By her calculations, it was Friday. Unfortunately for some poor soul, tonight the odds would be better than usual.

Her memory may have been perfect since it became unfettered by the shortcomings of the chemistry and biology of a human brain, but her memories were still organized the same way. She couldn’t zoom her Millie-Vision straight to the hospital. She had to pick her way along the route she would have driven to get there, sometimes struggling to recognize familiar landmarks in the garish landscape of her current view of the world.

She found the hospital. Around on the right side of one wing was the urgent care center. Now that she had found it she could zoom right in on it from now on. There didn’t seem to be much going on at the moment. Only a couple of people sat in the waiting room. She felt a little like a Peeping Tom, but she began to explore the rooms past the doors of the waiting room. In one of the nearby rooms she found someone getting their head stitched up. That didn’t seem likely to be fatal.

She explored more of the rooms throughout the hospital, not sure what she was searching for. She hoped she would know it when she saw it. What did a dying person’s aura look like? She found occupied rooms. The people she found were sick, some in pain, and either scared or bored but not dying.

She did discover something new though. Someone asleep. She had never examined a sleeping soul. She noted a subtle difference. Of course they were lying down and still, but there was something else. The sleeper’s aura had a different quality, the colors more serene and the pulsing patterns less frantic than waking ones. It seemed more open and, in a subtle way, less firmly connected to the body, as if a gentle nudge would send it flying free. For just a moment, she considered flashing over and touching the sleeping soul, but her natural reticence kicked in.

She no longer had the need to sleep, so the soul did not need it. But she saw that sleep did affect the aura of a person. It made sense that the body was not merely a vessel housing a soul, but that the two were connected and interacted with each other.

She studied the sleeper closely. She had not studied the connection of the aura and the flesh. Looking for it now, she saw the forces that bound the soul to the body, an unfamiliar color/flavor/scent/feel of energy. It differed from the sunlight, the electricity running through the wires in the building, the tiny forces that hold atoms together, or gravity. By now she was well familiar with all of those. Not sure she should think of these connections as energy, she didn’t have words to describe them, only what they were not. With this knowledge came the realization that the connection could be interrupted. With enough energy, the connections could be broken, casting the spirit free. The thought gave her a sick feeling.

Millie withdrew her view to her cubicle, shaken. Shocked that such a thing would even occur to her, like considering the mechanics of crushing someone’s windpipe with your bare hands. Would an otherwise healthy body without a soul die, or is there more to it than that? To distract herself from the disturbing thoughts, she looked in on Martin.

He wasn’t at his desk, so swooning over him did not offer the convenient diversion she hoped. She decided to find out if other living things had an aura, or if humans were unique. Kim of the loud and endless personal calls had a sad little philodendron on her bookcase. She cast her magical gaze on it. The plant had an aura, much simpler than a person’s, bound to the plant with the same binding she noticed in the sleeper at the hospital. Why not? She flashed over to the plant, touched it, and knew what it was to be this plant: the simple imperative to draw moisture, to soak in the sun’s rays, and to reproduce. The plant was thirsty, hungry and horny. Not sad, anxious, or bored. There was no sense of past choices made or future choices possible as there was with people, only simple being.

She chose a single leaf, memorizing the location and qualities of each bond between the leaf and its aura. With a small amount of her cache of energy, she canceled out the all the connections, withdrew and watched. The aura lost its normal precise synchronization with the leaf, expanded, wavered, and then snapped back into place, reforming the bonds. Apparently separating the two was not a simple as that. Perhaps she needed to disconnect the whole thing. She didn’t want to kill the plant, but it was just a sad little heartleaf that Kim was slowly killing anyway. As it turned out, there was no need to worry; the whole aura reattached itself as well when she severed the bindings. If she separated the two and pulled them further apart for a period, perhaps that would do it. But she didn’t have any notion of how to do that and didn’t want to use any more energy anyway. She was saving up for her next message to Martin.

Millie returned to the sweet spot in her cubicle and pondered. She studied the perfect memory of the connections between the body and the soul she had observed. She was no physicist, but she had keen powers of observation born of her thousands of hours of drawing from life. The bonds were not the same as any of the four fundamental forces she saw everywhere around her. That didn’t surprise her; the Standard Model was known to be incomplete. Only recently had they confirmed the existence of the Higgs field, which permeated the entire universe and imparted mass on any particle that interacted with it. Maybe this was the so-called Dark Energy or the carrier for the “spooky action at a distance” known as quantum entanglement. She found physics interesting, the principle that the act of observation disturbs the observed and all that, but she knew she had a superficial understanding. She didn’t have the knowledge or brainpower to work through this theory. So she went back to something she knew she was good at, observation.

Studying items in her cubicle, she detected the energy of this fifth force, flowing both into and out of her things in the box, like a magnetic field in which the positive and negative poles were the same point. She had seen it before of course, but she had not noticed it. She didn’t want to call it the Life Force. That was corny and not quite right. This was the force of creation, the force that was the byproduct of creation, the force that bound the physical self to the soul, allowed the disassociated soul to stay in the physical world. And who knew what else? Since no one argued the point, she decided to call it the Millie Force.

She studied the Millie Force in the sun’s rays, somehow piggy backing the regular photons. The guys at the Large Hadron Collider would love this. What use was this information? She had no idea, but more information was always a good thing. Well, almost always. She recalled when a friend in High School decided to share every detail of her first sexual encounter. TMI.

She had had enough Mr. Wizard stuff for the moment, so she glanced across the room and saw that Martin was back at his desk. She watched him for a while, her thoughts wandering here and there as the afternoon continued. Martin pecked away at his computer, but something was making him anxious. Then late in the day he suddenly became even more distressed from reading something on his computer. She studied the screen trying to read it. In her Millie Vision, everything was made of layers of energy lattices in an infinite spectrum of colors, but the flat panel monitor was even worse than most things. After fine-tuning her focus to just the layer of liquid crystals, she could make out what was on the screen amid a desktop color theme beyond imagination.

What had upset Martin was an invitation to a mandatory conference call on Monday. Millie understood why that upset Martin, but once you’re dead, getting laid off seemed trivial. She wanted to comfort him, but she didn’t have a way to do that yet. She didn’t have enough energy for a physical message at the moment. Besides, a brief note in toner dust or hole punch chads would probably not make him feel better.

Chin up.

Could be worse.

Could be dead.

Love, Millie

Nope. She debated trying to touch him, to see if she could somehow communicate more directly that way. But maybe it would just freak him out. Their earlier touches had been short and superficial, like the brush of a hand on a thigh. She wanted to hold him in her arms, a much more intimate contact. While this familiar debate raged within her, Martin got up and headed for the door. She considered following him, but she hesitated. She took her indecision as a sign that the time was not right. Or she chickened out. She was not sure which.

Reading a computer screen was an exciting development. To distract herself from the pain of her latest indecision, she cast about until she found someone using the computer. Most had already left for the day. TGIF! But there were a few poor souls still at their desks pounding away. She read their screens as well. One played solitaire.
Probably waiting for the boss to leave.

She had learned to duplicate buttons on the copier. Why not learn the keys of the keyboard as well? Were different computers different? She didn’t know if there were standards, but she figured there must be, otherwise mice and keyboards wouldn’t be interchangeable. She watched each of the last few people as they typed and used the mouse. Memories of using her keyboard provided a map. She recorded the corresponding minute electrical surge from each keystroke and the elements of mouse clicks and movements in her perfect memory. She had most of the keys mapped in her mind by the time everyone left. With great excitement, she looked at her computer and contemplated sending Martin a message. With dismay, she realized she didn’t know the power button.

Not being able to start up her computer and try it out was disappointing, but she knew it wouldn’t take long to catch someone starting up their machine. In the meantime she needed something else to occupy her until someone came back into the office. She could fast forward until someone came in, but then she recalled her project to spot another ghost. Might as well do something else useful, at least until morning.

She remembered the precise location of the hospital emergency room now, so she didn’t have to follow the roads like before. Her Millie Vision zipped to the waiting room. There wasn’t much going on, but it was early. She looked around through the hospital but didn’t see anything that looked promising. Six people were in the ER, but none of them in danger of dying. The patients appreciated that, but it meant her vigil might take a while. She felt so Goth, waiting for a chance to witness death.