Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle

by Daniel M. Strickland

  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.

  2

  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 b
ut 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.

  Knowing that navigating the corporate travel website mess could take a while and might be impossible if enough people tried to use it at once, he decided to check the new message to see if it deserved a higher priority. The latest email came from corporate finance canceling any corporate travel for employees below Vice President. Typical. Martin wondered which of these two urgent requests would be victorious. Let the games begin!

  After a couple of minutes his email client issued a machinegun barrage of urgent tones. Countless otherwise intelligent individuals were hitting the “Reply All” button and sending their respective “What am I supposed to do?” messages to both the sources and to everyone else on the distribution list. Martin laughed as they scrolled in faster than he could delete them. Then they stopped. Either they had overwhelmed the email server and caused it to crash, or the administrator had shut it down.

  Martin knew it would be a few minutes before it came back up, so he went to the travel site for grins. The website had a big banner across the home page, “No travel until further notice,” and the login was disabled. Game over. The guys who control the money always win.

  He didn’t bother waiting for the email to recover and deliver the official “clarification.” He shut his computer down and prepared to go home. While he went through the routine, he wondered if this was a harbinger of a major upheaval. Budget cuts were precursors to unpleasant things such as layoffs. Maybe there’ll be a lot more name plaques in Don’s flower box before the week is out.

  3

  There's a tappin in the floor

  There's a creak behind the door

  There's a rocking in the chair

  But nobody's sitting there

  —From “Ghosts” by Michael Jackson

  Millie waited for Martin, anxious to see if he got the message and to see his reaction. It would take more messages of course, but now she didn’t have to use so much energy to get to his cubicle. Martin came down the aisle, swung past the file cabinet without a pause and plopped into his chair. Disappointed, she pondered her next move as she watched.

  Wesley came and stopped in the entrance to Martin’s Cube. After standing there a moment, he tapped Martin on the shoulder. Martin’s aura flared with what she believed was surprise and Wesley’s rippled with amusement. Wesley pointed at the message and Martin stood to look at it. The heart she no longer had skipped a beat. Martin’s aura indicated confusion and mild annoyance. But he saw it!

  She didn’t want to wait days until she charged up again. It was going to take a lot more messages to explain everything, if she ever could. Days between messages would take too long. It occurred to her, randomly staring at her keyboard, that if her objects sustained her, maybe they could recharge her as well. She willed the energy in the keyboard to become hers.

  It felt (looked? tasted?) as if she had been hit in the face with a baseball bat. Not that she knew how that felt. Tennis racket, yes. Bat no. She saw stars. But, Huzzah! Her storehouse was full. But the keyboard was dead, another lifeless object. A brief terror vibrated through her, but the sustaining field generated by the items in her cubicle, while less powerful than it had been, was still powerful enough. Damn, better be careful.

  The high of exploration and discovery slipped out the back door and a big, fat feeling of foreboding waddled in the front. She went over what she had learned about her capabilities and limitations. She tried to find a new angle to come at it. There were no epiphanies. She could make the choice or continue to exist as long as possible. Getting the box moved was ultimately a pointless goal, but at the moment it was what she had. She needed a project. Something to work on until something better came along. She considered casting her net wider and trying to contact other people, but for whatever reason, she knew that Martin was her best chance.

  She brooded until the sun set and the auras made their way out to the elevator and then past the guard’s desk and through the entrance into the parking lot. It was time for the next message. She flashed over to Martin’s. The dust was gone. Apparently Martin had decided to clean. She considered gathering dust to build up a message but discarded that as too time and energy consuming. Let’s not get too creative. She had also moved chads from her hole punch. She recognized a large heavy-duty one on Martin’s desk. There were chads in the shallow tray on the bottom of the punch she could nudge out and a few around it that had escaped on their own. She set to work moving the chads into a message.

  It was harder than she thought. There weren’t as many things to move, but they were so much heavier, and she had to move them
so much farther. Again, the message needed to be brief, but she had so much to say. She wrote, “Can’t sit. Millie.” There was not enough juice to move any more dots. As she wrote the words, she willed them to convey a deep sense of her need. The idea that willing such a thing could make it happen might just be magical thinking, but this seemed to be a magical place where only will and energy mattered. Then she flashed back to her oasis of life sustaining Millie essence.

  4

  An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

  —Charles Dickens

  The next morning, as he made his way to his cubicle, Martin wondered for the umpteenth time if the next layoff had his name on it and if it might be better if it did. He also imagined himself lobbing a grenade down a row of cubicles and taking cover behind the fire door. He was not sure if such wondering was the result of repressed hostility or from playing too much Call of Duty.

  When he reached his cubicle, he found a new message on his desk in neatly arranged chads from his three-hole punch: “Can’t sit. Millie.” If there was a joke there, he didn’t get it. He looked around to see if any of the office practical jokers were watching and snickering, but he saw none. He took a picture of it with his phone and swept the bits into the trashcan. The thought of filling up a trashcan with holes amused him. He sat and fired up his computer. While it was starting up, he sent the picture to Wesley with the text message: “Another msg. Plot thickens.”