Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (15 page)

The chaotic impressions coalesced into a single image, Millie stood before him. With a smile she handed him a cheap paper plate and a plastic fork. On the plate was a piece of yellow sheet cake covered in chocolate frosting and decorated with a red piping gel heart. Reflexively, he reached to take them.

When he touched the plate, the world exploded into a kaleidoscopic display. Wild fountains, geysers, pools, falls and jets of indescribable colors replaced the image of Millie. For a moment he marveled at the spectacle. Then it dawned on him that there was meaning in the magnificent madness and that he understood the meaning.

This scene had not replaced Millie; this was Millie. Creative energy cascaded; compassion pooled with eddies of introspection, subdued joy washed over everything, and fear sprayed in an angry geyser. Decisions laid in layers like built up deposits of sediment, forming her bedrock, with ephemeral rays of possibilities constantly forming and fading away, leading off into infinity.

He tried to form words, to convey them, to express the awe and beauty of what he saw. As he tried to express this, he understood that this connection, this vision, was a fundamental machine code communication, at a lower level than language. There would be no Q&A.

He tried to absorb it, to memorize what he saw, to keep with him forever. He found a red pulsing thread, its roots shallow in the bedrock but growing, winding its way underneath to him. No, not only did it come to him but also from him. Perhaps he should be alarmed. He was not. Now he literally knew what the connection looked like between two people.

Then there was only Millie’s smiling face fading away like the Cheshire cat into the darkness behind his eyelids. She was gone. The memory of the vision was as though trying to recall a dream, vivid and solid but becoming vague and unsubstantial as he tried to grab it and hold on. There had been colors that did not exist; he remembered that in an abstract way but not what they looked like. It was not seeing exactly. His mind just interpreted it as a vision. He had peered into Millie’s soul. He knew that was what he had seen. It was not one of those wishy-washy kinds of things you “know” that are open to revision given new information, but more like an unshakable faith that defies anything that refutes it. But the details had slipped away. Only the impressions of Millie, the sheer beauty of her and the growing connection between them remained. If only he could hold onto all of it.

Why had she broken the connection? Was she embarrassed that he saw the connection? Maybe she was still watching the computer. He typed, “Millie, are you there?”

“
y” appeared.

Not knowing how to put it, he wrote, “Why did you leave?”

“
ned enrgy,” was the response.

As he interpreted
need energy
he realized that he felt chilled and drained. Not just emotionally spent as one might expect from touching a ghost, viewing her soul, but physically chilled and drained as though he had the flu. He entered, “I am tired too. How do you get energy? Can I help?”

“
Type all keys” flowed across the next line.

That confused Martin a bit. Was typing going to energize her somehow? He didn’t think so. Probably there was nothing he could do to help her there. So maybe this would help her use the computer. Whatever she did to create the letters on the screen, she seemed to have it under control. Did she somehow paint them on the LCD? He moved the window they had typed in around on the screen. The letters went with it. Was she activating the keys? He hadn’t seen or heard them move. There would be time for that later. He entered, “You want me to type every possible key on the keyboard?”

“
y” appeared.

Martin was familiar with doing this kind of thing from his days as a software tester. He thought about it a minute and then methodically went through the keys. Then he went through them with the caps lock down. It would take a while to get through all the possible combinations with the shift, control, alt, option and command keys. She asked for it, so he gave it to her.

The fatigue weighed him down but subsided as he worked. Finally he finished. He selected the long string of gibberish in the window and deleted it. He typed, “Done. Now what.”

The response after a few seconds was, “<3,” and nothing more.

Martin waited a few seconds to see if there would be more and then typed, “Millie?” After a couple of minutes with no response, he concluded that she was gone sleeping or recharging or whatever ghosts do. He couldn’t wait to talk to her again, to touch her again. That sounded like a high school kid with a crush, but he didn’t care.

He created the new user, Yolanda Westridge on the computer and set the screen saver to bounce the words, “Yolanda’s. Don’t touch,” around the display. He stepped back to admire the scene and to detect any flaws in the tableau. He packed up the things he wasn’t leaving behind.

He picked up the two sculptures to put them back in the box but stopped to study them. The marble one was all graceful curves and smooth transitions. Its surfaces were mostly polished smooth but with unexpected textures embossed into the stone in places. These textures made the piece unlike anything he had seen before, but something about them seemed familiar. The welded metal statue was all angles and jarring transitions. On this one, the few clean, gleaming surfaces served as accents. Nearly every surface was etched with a filigree of doodle marks resembling ancient mystical runes. The patterns looked very much like the minute patterns in the toner dust portrait of Millicent Able.

He had admired the pair when he saw them the night he first snuck into her cubicle and rummaged through her stuff. Now he felt a deeper understanding and connection to them as though he himself had a part in their creation. He decided to take them with him. He couldn’t leave them there. Someone who didn’t get them the way he did might take them. He left with his things and the statues.

Back at E6, under the shadow of the column, he put the two works of art on the bookshelf between O’Reilly books with a rhino and a lemur on the cover respectively.
I can’t leave them here.
Someone might recognize them and know that he took them. He could take them home. Maybe he should take them back. At the moment he wanted to carry them around with him. Perhaps it would be easier to decide later. He put them in the bottom drawer of his four-drawer filing cabinet and pushed in the lock at the top.

Mission “Occupy Millie’s Cube” completed, he knew he should head back to the Batcave. He really wanted to visit Millie again, to do the soul touch thing again, or at least trade more typed messages. But, it was best if he didn’t go into her cubicle too often. Someone might see him and get nosey. He could message her from anywhere, but he figured she was done for the day at least. All her earlier messages: the first in the dust, the one created with the chads, and two from the copier, had all been once per a day.

His initial stunned calm began to leak, an earthen levee in a hurricane tidal surge, thoughts and emotions rolling over the top, digging a channel, increasing the flow. In that one brief, dazzling meeting he knew her better than anyone he had ever known. Better than his parents. Better than any friend or lover. Better than even himself. But he didn’t know anything about her existence, what it was like in the afterlife. It was maddening that he couldn’t just ask her.

Are other ghosts out there using computers and copiers? He figured he would have heard about it. But who knew, there might have been someone locked up in the loony bin because he insisted he got faxes from dead people. The world was infinitely skeptical and at the same time ready to believe the most outrageous nonsense.
Scully and Mulder, metaphors for the human condition
.

His heart raced, and his hands shook, his body beginning to react as well. Martin wanted to tell someone, everyone. He wanted to keep it a secret. He felt like a kid with his first crush, but he knew it was no crush. Time to get moving. Just sitting there, the raging flood of thoughts might wash away whole neighborhoods of reason. There was plenty to think about, but not all at once.

After putting his office in order, he backtracked the maze to its entrance, found his faded Nissan in the parking lot, and headed home. He stopped at a busy deli for something to eat and to sit with people in a lame attempt to reconnect with humanity. He sat at the counter. Maybe someone would sit beside him and strike up a conversation.

What’s new with you?

Not much. Just met this girl.

Yeah, what she like?

Well, she’s a ghost…

I know what you mean buddy. My ex was like that.

It didn’t happen, and just sitting there didn’t help. Martin was among them but not with them, thinking only of Millie, tuning everything else out.

The sparsely furnished grotto of his apartment was no better or worse. The thoughts went around and around, lots of question for which he had nowhere to turn for answers. There were no dreams. There was no sleep.

By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.

—
From
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare

Millie felt the now familiar contact with Martin’s aura, as wonderful and nearly overwhelming as before. But she sensed that he felt little. She expected a big reaction in his aura, but there wasn’t. Disappointment and sadness washed over her.

Her first impulse was to withdrawal and consider other options, but she hesitated in order to take in the full experience of Martin’s spirit while she had the chance. While she watched, an ephemeral strand faded into view between them and then solidified. Energy flowed from her stores. It took a fair amount to set up the link, but less to run it. She supposed it made sense that it took energy to form and support the connection; everything takes energy, everything except sitting in her little bubble and watching. She could not hold the channel open for long.

She experienced a few stray memories floating on the surface of his consciousness as the connection was coalescing. Lifting the image she had created off the copier, rummaging through a strange de-saturated wreck of an office building, and marking blocks of printed code with an orange highlighter. The singularity that was the essence of Martin was there, a jet of energy surged from the point toward her. A narrow crimson umbilical also snaked between them like the red thread of fate. This connection did not use energy. It seemed rather to be a funnel or wormhole, alike but not identical to the connections she had observed between a soul and its creations.

A shock-wave moved through the vision of Martin. He viewed her soul for the first time. She would have smiled if she had the equipment. Anticipation and apprehension swelled. Would he like what he saw? She was simultaneously sure he would and dreadfully uncertain.

In the first moments she read the reaction to be amazement and wonder, then a dawning understanding of the vision. She attempted to speak to him with all her will, hoping the connection would allow communication. He didn’t seem to hear her and she wasn’t getting anything from him. Maybe whoever designed this existence didn’t want this waiting room to be too attractive a place to stay.
Make your own choice Millie. No talking to your neighbors.
The soul is certainly older than language. Maybe it has its own tongue, like the machine language which modern programing languages were layered on top of—the voice of the angels. Perhaps such a language could be learned or discovered buried deep in her soul’s memory.

Since she couldn’t speak with him, she watched him as he watched her. She could not hear his thoughts, but she saw the results of the experience and his thoughts about it minutely affecting the abstract expressionist painting that was his soul; like tiny washes of added color or minute erasures, modifying the composition. She saw future possibilities rearranging themselves frantically from these slight changes. She wondered if she could learn to interpret those possibilities.

Then, while she watched the dance of things that might be, rising tides of love and joy flooded the painting and colored everything. She had her answer.

Her energy level approached critical. She broke the connection. She saw loss in his reaction, mourning the end of the vision.