Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (4 page)

Sitting on the box and charging got dull in a hurry. The flurry of discoveries and insights of the first days tapered off. She did learn that the flow of energy from the sun was constant. Clouds and rain must not affect it. The walls of the building and the Earth blocked the flow. Perhaps certain materials blocked the particular wavelength. Maybe it had nothing to do with physics, as she understood it. She probably would never understand everything about this realm.

She fast-forwarded through more and more of the day, but she did not want to spend all the time she had left watching the world zoom by. Watching Martin sitting at his computer with his headphones on, it occurred to her that Martin might help her if she asked. The thought thrilled her.

Why not?
It gave her something to think about anyway. She was so over thinking about moving the box herself. Her earlier shot at crossing the distance was a frightening failure, but now she had a store of energy and a smidgen of understanding of her situation. She wasn’t sure if her stockpile was enough to make the journey there and back.
Class, the theme of this story is… Come on, you should know this one by now. That’s right class, “You never know ‘til you try.”

Ok, assuming she made it there with energy left, what would she do when she got there? Tap him on the shoulder and say, “Hello I’m Millie the friendly ghost.” She could make sound using her energy to vibrate the air, but she could not, at this point, control it to create words. So, she could tap him on the shoulder and say, “Goo goo,” or blare at him like a foghorn. Communicating with gestures was out of the question because he couldn’t see her. She thought awhile about how to make herself visible. She discarded them as impractical at the moment. Then it occurred to her that she should leave him a note.

She couldn’t lift a pen. At this point, she had only managed to move a chad and specks of dust. That was it! She would create a note from things she could move. Her excitement grew. She checked her energy store and was pleased to note that she had amassed more than her last fill-up and was still collecting. Perhaps if she survived long enough she would have the energy to do whatever she wanted. If.

☼

Soon the pot was full, and it was time to get off the pot. The sun had risen, but Martin wasn’t at his desk yet. She wouldn’t wait any longer. He didn’t need to be there while she did it. It might freak him out. She rose above the cubicle wall and moved in a direct line toward Martin’s cubicle, watching the gas gauge. If she got near half she would abort and fly back to her little oasis.

She made it there with a little more than half remaining. She didn’t have much time. From her vantage point above the cubicle top, she saw a layer of dust on top of the cubicle. She didn’t have the time or the energy to write a detailed note, so she would first get his attention. She focused her energy and her will and began moving dust particles. As fast as her energy was depleting, she wasn’t even going to get a Twitter length message. She wrote, “Help me. M.” There was nothing like a distress call to get someone’s attention. She would have written her full name if she could have. There wasn’t time. She had to go.

She headed in a straight line back to her sanctuary. Had she waited too long? The needle was near E and the little “stop for gas, dummy” light glowed. She did not want to run out and… And what? “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” She urged herself to go faster, to be there now, and she was. At first she thought that she had inadvertently sat on the fast-forward button. Her gas gauge said otherwise. She had tried before to appear elsewhere and that didn’t work.

If she were nothing but energy, then maximum velocity was the speed of light. With that in mind, she flashed across her cubicle and back. Sweet. No energy required. She flashed across to Martin’s and back. Ha! She was a free standing wave of celestial probability. Her force of will alone allowed her to move up to the speed of light.

Before she had pictured herself all ghostly, floating slowly across the room and so she floated slowly across the room. Even in this place, she was the victim of her own preconceptions. She could go anywhere she wanted, fast. She just couldn’t stay very long.
How to See Rome in Five Minutes or Less
would be useful.

When I was a boy, I dreamed of one day working in a fabric-covered box.

—
From
Dilbert
by Scott Adams.

Martin made his way past the security desk, up the elevators, and through two sets of fire doors. The last door led to a room so large that they labeled the columns with large letters and numbers to navigate by like the names given to the different sections of an amusement park parking lot. Around the columns and beneath an endless array of buzzing fluorescent lights lay a labyrinth of cubicles. Sometimes he imagined himself to be the subject of a twisted government experiment or a rat searching for the cheese at the end of the maze, but not today. Today he mindlessly made his way to the center of the puzzle, as far from the windows as you could get, and to The World’s Worst Cubicle.

It wasn’t exclusively his opinion that his cubicle was the worst. His buddy, Wesley, had asked him whom he'd pissed off when he first saw where Martin sat. It shared a partition with the coffee station. One might think that a choice spot with quick and easy java access but not Martin. He didn’t drink the bitter sludge, and he found it hard to concentrate with all the traffic and the gossiping that went on while a fresh pot brewed.

That was but one of the qualities that made it The World’s Worst Cubicle. The corporate masters of furniture and floor space strove to keep everything the same. Everything that could be beige was beige. Everyone sat in the same model chair and used the same model of telephone. While every cubicle was the same standard size, almost a quarter of the space bound by Martin’s cloth-covered box was occupied by a column emblazoned with a plaque reading: “E6.”
Hit! You sunk my battleship!
He could barely roll his chair back from his desk without smashing into E6.

As if that wasn’t awful enough, across from the opening to his cramped beige box sat the big combination printer/scanner/copier/fax machine. The whirring, clunking, beeping, monolith called everyone on the floor to come and retrieve their treasures, to feed its paper trays, or to clear its jams. The never-ending stream of supplicants, who made the pilgrimage to this altar of modern office technology, stood staring bleakly into his cubicle as they waited for answers or prints or facsimiles or whatever. Their eyes judged him. Many times, he had requested a move to any one of the numerous empty cubicles scattered around the floor. The response was always the same. “There is no budget for that.”

Martin plopped into his chair. He started up his computer and put on his headphones to drown out the whining and kuh-chunking of the printer and the java junkies’ raucous reliving of last night’s ball game. Chopin was out of the question with the current decibel level. This called for something devoid of quiet passages, so he selected his playlist entitled, “Make my ears bleed.”

He was performing the ritual triage on his email in-box when someone tapped him on the shoulder. If it were possible to jump out of it, his skin would have been in a pile in the chair while the rest of him ricocheted off the ceiling. He pivoted in his chair to fend off the attack. Wesley stood there laughing at him. “Dude, not cool,” Martin said as he pulled off his headphones.

“
Man, you should have seen your face. You looked like you saw a ghost,” Wesley laughed. He was a tall guy with a shaved head. Martin didn’t know if he shaved it due to a receding hairline, or if it was a style statement. Where Martin's dress and demeanor was an attempt to make it through the day without detection, Wesley was very theatrical with a penchant for funny voices, bursting into song, and wearing the most ridiculous ties. Martin wasn’t one to make friends at the office. Most of the few he had made at work had been victims of “rightsizing” over the years or had gone looking for better opportunities. Wesley was an exception.

“
You scared the crap out of me. How about a warning or something?”

Wesley just chuckled, “What do you suggest? Last time the fire alarm sounded they had to come get you ‘cause you didn’t hear it. I don’t think Armageddon would get your attention when you've got those things on.”

Martin sighed, “Yeah, you’re right. What’s up? It’s kind of early to take a break.”

“
I just came over to see if you heard…” he began but stopped, looking down at the top of the tall four-drawer filing cabinet at the end of his desk. “Did you see this?”

“
Yeah, it’s pretty disgusting. They don’t dust the cubicles any more and they only empty the trash cans on Fridays. I’ve been meaning to bring in a Swiffer.” Martin was mildly annoyed that Wesley had startled him just to tell him he needed to dust.

“
No, not the dust. Well, it is the dust but look, someone’s left you a message,” said Wesley, sounding even more amused.

Everything amused Wesley. Martin liked that about him. It counterbalanced Martin’s own cynical nature. He wondered what infantile message had been scrawled into the dust on his filing cabinet. Something more original than “Wash me,” he hoped. He pushed his chair back, taking care not to crash into the column, because crashing into E6 might precipitate a series of events ending with the implosion of the building and the ultimate collapse of the economy of the free world. He stood on tiptoe to see.

Etched into the dust in a precise but flowery script was the message: “Help me. M.” Martin was disappointed. Not as trite as “Wash me” but not amusing either. He pulled a napkin from his desk drawer and wiped off the top of the cabinet.

“
What do you think it means?” asked Wesley in an exaggerated manner suggesting it was a significant but puzzling clue to a mystery.

“
It means someone has no imagination and too much time on their hands.”

Wesley of course, laughed. Martin couldn’t help but chuckle himself. “Have I heard what?”

“
Oh yeah, Don got the boot. He took the vacation he was due, so he’s already gone. Did you know he was six months short of being eligible for retirement since they changed the rules last year?”

Martin sighed, “That’s sad. I hadn’t heard, but I’m not surprised.” They worked for Sandstone Global Incorporated. SGI was a giant multinational corporation that had been downsizing for years as it died, a snake thrashing around after its head had been severed. Since the most recent economic meltdown, layoffs and firings for the most trivial reasons had become almost a weekly occurrence. Don took the whole mess personally. One of those sarcastic demotivational posters with a picture of a trash dumpster decorated his cubicle. It read: “Morale: Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is to fire all the unhappy people.”
Coincidence or prophecy?
Martin wondered. A long plastic flower box sat on Don’s desk. Planted in the soil like tombstones were the name plaques of coworkers who had departed. Written on the front of the planter in solemn letters was: “Rest in peace little soldiers. They can’t hurt you any more.” Martin supposed that Don saw it coming.

☼

The rest of the day was filled with the usual struggle to get any actual coding done, which was ostensibly his job. A constant hail of emails, instant messages, phone calls, text messages, and in-real-life visits by those who felt their tidings were too important to be entrusted to a mode of communication that could be ignored, conspired to prevent him from performing any activity enumerated in his job description. At 4:57 he started to shut everything off for the day when an “urgent” email came in. He knew it was urgent without looking because he had his email client set to make a different sound when one hit his in-box. Urgent messages were nothing remarkable; almost everything he got was urgent, but he was well programmed to at least scan it before leaving the office. Not to would be perilous. This particular email came from the division office reminding everyone of the deadline to make travel arrangements for the corporate conference by the end of the day. Martin knew about the conference but was unaware that today was the deadline for travel arrangements. He supposed he might have missed it in a prior email, but he heard people swearing in the surrounding cubicles, so he wasn’t alone. He sighed and looked through his bookmarks for the corporate travel site when the tone for another urgent email’s arrival sounded.