She could follow the path her living self had followed, but what fun would that be? Instead she floated up to the space beneath the ceiling but above the cubicle wall and then began to move towards Martin. As she did, she experienced a rather curious sensation, as if being drained. Did she only imagine it? She didn’t think so. Slight at first but growing the further she went. She stopped, and the increase ceased. She hovered a moment to be sure. It didn’t stop or decrease as the fatigue of a physical exertion did. She didn’t recover by holding still. A steady discharge continued, as if it took an effort to hold still. If moving around used this much energy, then so much for carefree travel as part of her retirement lifestyle.
What happened if she used too much? Could the dead die? Then what? Wake up in Purgatory II where the dead go when they die? There should be a manual, dammit, with “Don’t Panic” in large, friendly letters on the cover. In a panic, she retreated to her cubicle. As she did so, the draining receded and then ceased. Something about her cubicle sustained her. Stuck for eternity in a six by six box. Perhaps this was Hell after all.
She monitored her sensations while she explored her immediate surroundings. She moved toward and away from different objects. The number of objects, each affecting the flow in differing amounts, made it a complicated procedure. After floating about a while, she concluded that she drew life support (death support?) from the items in the cubicle she touched the most. Her recently upgraded keyboard, mouse, and computer tower were good energy sources, as were the two sculptures on her bookcase. But the best was her chair. She supposed that was because she had the largest contact area for the most time with her chair. Newsflash! Sitting on your rear could save your life, story at 11. She sat on her chair. It felt much better sitting in it than it had when she was living. The stupid ergonomic chair did not accommodate people who were barely five feet tall. She sat and pondered.
Well, this was motivation to choose. When she thought about the twin songs, the Blazing Star of creative drive and Black Hole of recycled art supplies, the music swelled. Were these objects the only possible source of energy? Would they eventually be depleted? She reached out to touch the power flowing through the wires in the floor. It tasted (really? tasted?) nasty and was not energizing. As she contemplated the flow of energy, she noticed a trickle of another kind coming through the opening of her cubicle from the window beyond.
She cast her sense out in that direction, following the stream, and found that the sun was the source. The sun: a roiling, boiling ball, burning with the power of creation, fusing atoms together to form new atoms, devouring Hydrogen and creating Helium with the glorious byproduct of energy. She stared into the sun. There was another plus to being a ghost: gazing into the sun without being blinded. She saw the reaction and understood as no one had before. More than light and heat, more than modern physics comprehended, there was a living energy streaming out into the solar system. The fundamental stuff of creation poured forth, and in the background she heard the sun singing a pale reflection of Blazing Star’s song.
The energy of her objects sustained her in their proximity, but the energy of the sun was different. Though slight, it was energy to be collected and stored. She felt power flowing into her like that first cup of coffee in the morning. She sat and basked, until the stream decreased and then stopped. The sun had risen to a point, and no longer shined on her spot through the window. She still saw the sun through the walls, but the building absorbed or blocked the flow of living energy. Perhaps she should pop outside during the day. After a short study, she saw the flux was greater beyond the walls but not strong enough to overcome the drain of being that far from her stuff.
Sitting and waiting for tomorrow’s sunshine was boring. She wished for a way to make time pass quicker, and then it did. She entered that perceptual time dilation you sometimes experience when absorbed in something you love to do. Time flew. She didn’t realize it at first because so much in her view was static. People had become blurred streams of color like taillights in a time-lapse photo. They left the building, the sun set, the sun came up, and people began whizzing into the building, all in what seemed to be a few minutes.
That was cool. She wondered if she could slow time as well. She watched Martin coming down the aisle toward his cubicle and thought about him slowing. Nothing happened. She called up memories of those moments when the tennis ball just seemed to hang there, waiting to be hit. He shifted into slow-mo; one foot hung in the air for a moment before descending. Could she go back and leave the goat cheese that led to her demise off the salad? She tried, but the best she managed was to slow everything until it almost appeared frozen but still moved forward.
When she stopped to consider, it made sense. She suspected that what she was controlling was her own perception of time and not time itself. A personal fast forward and slow motion function would be a most effective way to skip the tedious and savor the interesting.
Two auras she did not recognize came down the aisle to the opening of her cubicle. They startled her when they stopped, turned, and entered her workspace. Taken aback, she froze in place. They moved in to either side of her chair and dropped a box on it. The box forced her out of the chair. As this occurred, the intruder moved to stand where she had been pushed.
They didn’t displace her as the box had. It didn’t hurt as passing into the cubicle wall had. She registered a sensation, but it was not pain. She sensed a disturbance in the person’s aura as though they were aware of the contact as well. Reflexively, she moved under the desk to hide. They were still for a moment and then began taking things from the shelf and putting them into the box. When they finished the shelf, they started with the desk and the drawers.
At first, she just wished they would hurry, but as their work progressed it occurred to her they might take all her stuff. Would she have to follow her stuff, or was there enough energy in the floor and the desk to sustain her?
She would have taken action if she could think of anything to do. They finished their task while she still feverishly tried to think of what to do. They went to the entrance to the cubicle, paused and leaned over to look under the desk, right at her. She held her breath. Not that she had breath, but she held it. Then they left, leaving the box on the chair.
She was relieved they left her things, but she couldn’t get to the sweet spot on her chair. That troubled her. Her existence here was quite fragile if it depended on her stuff. She no longer had any immediate family to come and get it since the car crash took her parents, but sooner or later they would do something with it. Store it or throw it away, and the desk and chair would be inhabited by someone else. Would their energy replace hers or coexist? She was afraid she knew the answer to that one.
She was beginning to see why there weren’t ghosts everywhere. If one of the songs wasn’t appealing enough to get an immediate decision, here was more motivation. Choose to die or fade away or… She would have shivered if she had anything to shiver. Perhaps ghosts were as invisible to her as they were to the living. She couldn’t see herself after all. But she saw no way to test the hypothesis at the moment.
She returned to being annoyed about the box in her chair. Sitting on top of the box wasn’t as good. She pushed herself down into the box. The energy it took to cohabitate the solid objects was more than the benefit of contact with the seat of the chair, and it hurt. She tried the underside of the chair. Not as good. Could she move the box? She hadn’t tried to interact with the real world other than trying to pass through things. Or maybe this is the real world. Ooh, the world is an illusion. Take the blue pill. Anyway, she should at least try to move the box.
How does an incorporeal being interact with physical objects? The stories of poltergeists throwing furniture around suggested the possibility—if any of those stories were true. Her attempts to physically push an object resulted in her passing into the object. She needed a different approach. Okay, let’s step back a bit, she thought. The difference between an object at rest and an obje
ct in motion is energy. Perhaps she could use the sweet sun juice she had stored.
If imparting energy on an object were possible, could she control the form the energy took? The object might just spin or heat up or gain electrical charge. Atoms fuse and fission. Millie the Mighty, Dr. Manhattan!
Beginning a chain reaction seemed unlikely since her things didn’t contain fissionable material. If she understood these things, it took a lot of power to fuse a significant amount of matter. It might be a good idea to keep it in mind. She had no idea how much power she had, but it seemed tiny.
She decided to start small. A small, flat, disk laid on top of the desk. She judged it to be a chad from her hole punch. That should be light with little friction on the smooth desktop. So, she had her object picked, but now what? She concentrated on the image of pushing it with her finger. A tendril of living energy flowed from her toward the object and passed through it into the desk. Ouch. She tried again, focusing on the tip of her finger being solid. She didn’t press into the chad, but it also didn’t move. Bodily (as it were) interacting with an object didn’t work. She needed a different approach.
Perhaps will power was the answer. She focused on the object and willed it to move. Nothing happened. She tried again. She concentrated so hard blood vessels would have burst it she had any. Still nothing. Of course nothing happened. Why would her will power affect a foreign object? She didn’t know all the rules of this place yet, but that made sense.
She needed kinetic energy. Again she considered her store of energy, growing like her philodendron in the sunshine. Perhaps she could consciously convert her stored energy into kinetic energy. It made more sense that her will could act on her own power supply. Her will should direct her energy supply. As it occurred to her, the notion seemed so natural, like the idea that if you can walk, you can run.
Of course she had no idea how to do this, but she knew the answer was will power. She had wanted herself to move, and she did. She wanted time to pass quicker, and it did. And there was the offer of a grand choice rather than the karmic assignment by a deity. Choose your final destiny, the ultimate exercise of free will. The physical media of this place may be energy, but the key theme of this Neverland was the exercise of will.
Enough philosophy, she thought, back to moving the dot. She focused first on her power store, feeling the flow of sweet sunshine into the well. She willed the flow to stop and it did. Before considering that perhaps that was not a good idea, she resumed the flow and relief superseded panic (prior to implementation). Then she concentrated on using this stored energy, converting the potential to kinetic. She visualized motion, the chad’s molecules moving in the same direction at the same speed, and the dot scooting across the desktop. She thought all of that simultaneously, and the dot slid to the right.
Woohoo, I’m Jean freaking Grey! It wasn’t easy, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach while doing Vector Calculus. So, interaction with the physical world was possible. She was a little disheartened that moving such a tiny object a fraction of an inch took a noticeable amount of her energy reserve. Maybe I can learn to be more efficient. She experimented with slowly restricting the flow more and more. The tiny paper disk moved slower and slower until she was no longer overcoming friction, then it stopped. It took less to move it slower, but there was a limit to how slow the chad would go.
She was never going to be able to move the stupid heavy box. Then again, maybe mass wasn’t a factor. She figured that was unlikely. The rules of Neverland might be different, but she was interacting with the physical world. In that world the laws of physics dictated that the amount of energy necessary was proportional to the mass.
She moved a speck of dust the same distance as the chad. That took much less energy. Sometime she hated being right. Just for the hell of it, she took her whole remaining ball of energy and tried to move the box. Nothing happened. The energy was gone, but the box did not move. Dang.
Maybe she would save up enough eventually. She wondered if there was a limit to her storage capacity. Since there wasn’t Google or freaking angels to ask, there was only one way to find out.
☼
She sat on top of the box, collecting during the morning and fast-forwarding through the nights. She could have zoomed through the days as well because it didn’t affect the amount of energy collected. The sirens sang to her in the background. She spent the time studying the office, reconciling her memories of the physical area with what she saw and identifying auras.
In addition to Martin she believed she recognized Wesley, Alice, and her supervisor Ron. In the adjoining cubicles sat her coworkers: Kim of the endless personal phone calls and Tony of the many body piercings. Tony was the easiest.
Tony sat in his cubicle playing with his phone. Ron came to the entrance of his cubicle. Ron was annoyed, his aura bristling with acerbic colors and patterns. Tony’s belligerence was clear from the undertones of grumpy vibes. The encounter was typical for them. Reading their auras did not feel like a new thing but more like rediscovering an old friend. She thought that perhaps everyone knew how to do this and just thought of it as intuition.
When she tired of studying the office, she explored the senses that she seemed to have. Not senses really, but sense. This thing she thought of as a kind of vision was something more than that. It was more of a knowing than perceiving in a physical way and seemed to encompass all her previous senses. She couldn’t exactly hear, but she “saw” sound waves. She supposed that, given enough time, she might learn to interpret them, just as an infant learns to understand what she hears. Touch was also a vibration she saw in her pseudo-plasma person that she understood to be a feeling. As for taste and smell… She figured she could probably learn to use her one uber sense to differentiate materials by sight with a great deal more accuracy than taste or smell.
But Millie was a very visual person, so the god-like vision was the best. She hadn’t yet explored beyond the confines of the office with it, but she knew somehow that there was no limit to how far she could explore. With it, she could see anything, anywhere. The only limitation she knew of so far was that she could not notice everything at once. She still had to place her attention on one thing at a time. I may have god-like vision but only ordinary human comprehension.
She could explore the universe, but she might spend a lot of time looking at nothing, trying to find something worth seeing. The stars were easy to find, each one a small blazing beacon of energy. She pointed her magic telephoto lens into space and zoomed past stars, gas giants and swirling nebulas. She wondered if what she saw was the energy of these objects as it reached her spot on earth, moving further back in time the further out she went or if she was witnessing them as they were at that moment. There was no way to find out. There was no one standing on a street corner in the Crab Nebula to stop and ask what Earth year it was.
She wasn’t sure how long she had spent gawking. Losing herself in the vastness of space was tempting, but she thought she had better figure some things out before she spent too much time sightseeing.
She turned her attention to the microscopic, focusing in on smaller and smaller scales. At what: chemical bonds, atomic bonds, subatomic bonds, and perhaps the equivalent energy of subatomic particles? It didn’t look that different than space, but she could not tell what she was looking at, so she went back to people watching.
☼
She lost track of exactly how many days passed. They ran together. Keeping track was pointless. She could tell when the weekend came because hardly anybody came into the office. It had been more than a week and less than two when it happened.
She was full. The flow stopped.
The sun was still out there. She could still feel its energy. She moved a dust speck, and the flow started again for a few moments and then stopped. The tank was full. She had considerably more stored up but not on the order of the difference between the mass of a chad and the box.
What the heck, she thought. She put the pedal to
the metal, pulled out all the stops, went all in, and every other clichéd metaphor. She pictured the box inching across the chair. If she got the center of mass to the edge, gravity would do the rest. The chair rotated a few degrees, and stopped. Her supply was spent. Dang. She would have to hold the chair and push the box and she did not have enough juice. She wondered if, like aerobic capacity, the amount would increase with exercise. Once again, there was one way to find out. Maybe every poltergeist story was bogus and not just most of them.
She began building up her stores again while she considered her next move. It wasn’t necessary that she move the box. She was sustained the way things were, but it gave her a goal. The bigger question was what would she do when her stuff got pitched and her furniture reused. Try to follow her stuff? Make the choice, she supposed. Still, she wanted to see if other possibilities existed before she quit.
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.
Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle Page 2