Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (7 page)

No point lamenting how tenuous her position was. She had already paced back and forth on those thoughts until she’d worn a hole in them. She contemplated her next message.
This next one may be the last
. Try as she might she could not think of a message brief enough, informative enough, and convincing enough. Words, words, words. Not her strong suit. She considered drawing him a picture since that was her strength. Cosmic Pictionary. Later, she thought, if there is a later. She watched Martin as she moped.

When a line of people formed at the copier between her and Martin, it drew her attention. She began to study their auras as they stood and waited, this one impatient, those glad to be doing nothing for a few minutes. Each one of them stepped up to the copier, placed something on the glass, closed the lid and pressed a few buttons. She zoomed in close to see in detail what happened when they pressed each button. Collating that with her perfect memory of using the machine, she developed a picture of the electrical pulses that occurred when many of the keys were struck. While she observed, they used most of the numbers and the Start button. Duplicating them might be possible by converting her cache of life energy to electricity. The right pulse in the right place would imitate the circuit closing. Great, she could haunt the photocopier. She wasn’t going to try it now, her tiny store of energy too precious at the moment.

☼

Night came. The sun was below the horizon anyway. To her, it was never dark in the building. The glow of energy was everywhere. Only when she looked deep into the void of space, where matter and energy were scarce, did she see anything close to darkness. Even out there the faint glow of radiation from distant sources and quantum particles blinking into and out of existence provided a dim glow. The constant wild array of colors had become more familiar to her now. But she missed closing her eyes and letting a world of worries give way to the sweet embrace of sleep. The song of the Black Hole swelled, and she pushed it aside.

Most of the people had gone, but Martin sat at his desk. She considered going over and moving things around in front of him. Somehow she still thought that was not a good idea. She didn’t want to freak him out. She thought it would be better to slowly reveal her condition rather than hitting him in the face with it. Or perhaps that was just the introvert in her talking. She didn’t know. She decided she would go with what her instincts told her.

Martin rose from his desk. She assumed he was leaving for the day, but he turned down the aisle toward her area rather than heading toward the door. The mental equivalent of a thrill ran through her. She watched, riveted as he made his way toward her cubicle. He passed the opening. She wished she could say, “Hey! Looking for someone?” Of course, she probably wouldn’t, even if she knew how.

Stopping occasionally, he made a circuit around the group of attached cubicles that contained Millie’s last refuge. He made his way back to the opening of her cube and entered. Martin came over to beside the chair and put his hands on the top of the box where Millie was.

This time she did not move away. Last time it hadn’t hurt her, only scared her. She slowed her perception of time to a crawl. When she observed people’s auras from a distance, she got a sense of what was going on with them, what they were about, but this was altogether different.

It was all there in ultra-Technicolor. She instantly knew Martin as she had never known anyone, even herself. It overwhelmed her to try to understand it all at once, so she picked out prominent eddies to study. She saw his wry sense of humor, as well as twin currents of disaffection and a sense of fun that fed it. She smelled the desire to blaze brightly, the cold dark blankets of self-doubt, and inertia that tried to smother it. She tasted love, bound up, protected, and imprisoned and heard his mind roaring with curiosity. It seemed corny even to her, but she could feel his soul.
But as they say
, she thought,
it is what it is.

She wanted to give him a big hug. She sensed a slow motion ripple building in his aura. He had sensed her. Like being caught listening to someone’s private conversation, she was embarrassed and retreated to under the chair.

All that took but a moment in real time. Martin paused a second or two, turned on the light mounted under the bookshelf, opened the box and began looking through it. As he lifted each item and inspected it, she noticed something she had missed.

She assumed that the Millie Field generated by her things varied in intensity by the amount of physical contact in accordance to an elegant relationship such as: Millie Essence = (Neverland Constant) x (mass) x (duration of contact)^2. But the origami swan she had made in minutes burned much brighter than the yoga book she used daily. There was something missing from her equation. It was another mystery to unravel. She suspected it was an important one.

Martin put something, a slip of paper or a photograph, she couldn’t tell what, in his pocket. He put the lid back on the box and left. She was disappointed he didn’t move the box. But she was encouraged that she had gotten his attention and that he considered it possible the messages had a real connection to her.

She moved back to the sweet spot on top of the box and recalled the memory of Martin’s aura. She had a perfect snapshot of his soul frozen in her photographic memory, dazzling in its infinitely complex detail, and broad sweeping patterns. Frozen was not the right term though. Captured but not still. The memory moved and shifted as if it was itself a living thing. In it she felt history, sweeping changes over the years and infinite potential paths that lead off into the future. Breathtaking.

What would she do with such a gift? Not much at the moment. She hadn’t even gotten him to move the box. She would think about that later. Martin left the building. With her Millie-Vision she could follow him home. Then it would be possible to visit him there. Visit him, and do what? Her storehouse was full. Time to leave another message. Where? At his house? That didn’t seem to be a good idea though. She didn’t want him freaking out because the prank or “the thing from beyond the grave” was following him home.

She needed this message to have impact because she might not get another. That notion was sobering, but one thing at a time. She considered and discarded many possible delivery media. Most involved levels of energy she did not have. She scanned Martin’s cubicle looking for inspiration. She saw no chads in the punch, no dust on the shelf, and no trash in the can.
Awesome, the cleaning crew cleaned. Must be somebody new.

Pulling her gaze back to widen the search for message material, she came to the copier. She could make copies. She hadn’t tried it, but she knew it was possible. Her memory of the little pulses of power created by pressing the buttons, their texture and color, was as clear as if she were watching it now. The cover had been left open a crack, leaving room for a message to be constructed on the glass. She needed will power, her storehouse of energy, and building materials. First she considered the toner, but it was well contained inside the machine. Then she found dust and carpet fibers between the back of the machine and a cubicle wall.
Guess the cleaning crew hadn’t been that thorough.

There was plenty raw material there, but did she have the juice to lift enough of it? As she contemplated how frustrating it was to have supreme perception and memory but such a limited ability to do anything, a drifting dust mote caught her attention.

She watched the tiny collection of orderly energy patterns that constituted her view of solid matter as it drifted lazily on the air currents between the wall and the machine. Then it veered from its course and accelerated straight up through the gap, over the top of the machine, and then out into the room.

She would not have to lift the material from the floor to top. She only needed to coax them over to the vent in the floor, let them ride the current up, and then nudge them into the gap between the lid and glass. Frustration gave way to excitement. It would be difficult, but not impossible. Millie was willing to attack the difficult with vigor. It was the amount of impossible that was frustrating.

She still wasn’t sure she had enough energy. She studied the air currents; the swirling flows and eddies. By applying slight amounts of energy here and there, she could nudge those around as well, causing them to lift the particles and deposit them on the glass. She got even more excited. Figuring out how was always her favorite part of any project.

She committed to the plan. She realized she should have considered other possibilities, but she found the challenge too exciting to resist. She could do it. The message still needed to be brief. If she had to, she would plunder the energy from another of her items. What the hell, you only live (or exist as incorporeal consciousness) once, and maybe not for much longer.

Sunrise was near when she felt she had studied the problem until she wasn’t getting anything more out of observation. Time to do it. She flashed over to the copier.

She slowed her perception to the minimum and began applying minute amounts of energy to swirling air currents. They swooped up a load of particles and carried them upward. She used measured little amounts of energy here and there to keep most of them on course and deposit them on the glass. Once she had a load on the glass, she began to multitask. She interlaced her attention between coaxing the material up the air currents and assembling the message.

She had been so involved in figuring out how to build the message that she hadn’t thought much about the content. It was probably a pointless exercise anyway, but she didn’t care because the process of creating it was intoxicating. As she worked, she held the image in her mind of Martin’s aura and wove the message to be in harmony with it. It took little power to move the particles using the air currents, but it took time for them to make their way up over the machine and onto the glass. Being so far from her sanctuary drained her more than moving the material.

She assembled “Help me, Martin. Can’t Sit. Can’t See,” on the glass, elegantly woven in fibers and dust. The font and the layout pleased her. Little juice remained in her batteries; she needed to hit the start button and go. But something more needed to be added to the message, something very important. She flashed back to her cubicle and sucked all the sweet juice from her mouse and zapped back over to the copier. That took maybe a millisecond in real time. She continued the dance of fibers and dust up from the floor to the glass until she had added “Love, Millie.” to the message.

She willed the message to tell Martin so much more than what the actual words said: to be the story of her existence, her need, and of how in one shining moment she had come to know him as she had never known anyone, and to love him. She knew the energy pattern for 9, so she created three of them and then duplicated the energy pattern for start. The machine began to run as she flashed back to her spot on top of the box. She doubted the machine had 999 sheets of paper in it, but it should create a big enough pile to get his attention. She waited.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

—
From
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens

The next morning, Martin approached his infamous cubicle, impaled on the stake of column E6, with curiosity. Would there be a new message? He rounded the final turn of the labyrinth. A woman stood in front of the Dais of Digital Duplication, her arms crossed, her look disapproving of him. He wondered if he imagined it because—well—because he always imagined things. He got the answer to both of those musings as he wheeled around the filing cabinet into his cubicle. Piled on his chair was what must have been an entire tray of printer paper. On top of the stack was a sticky note that read, “Waste not, want not. Stop killing trees.” He pulled it off and tossed it in the trash.

The top page read, “Help me, Martin. Can’t Sit. Can’t See. Love, Millie.” The message appeared to be carefully crafted from bits of carpet fibers woven together and laid out on the copy glass. He was afraid of what might be on the rest of the pages. He lifted the first page off of the stack. The second page contained the same image. He leafed down through the pages. They were all the same. He glanced over his shoulder at the machine and saw the disapproving woman brushing bits of stuff off the copy glass.