Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle Read online

  by Daniel M. Strickland

  Synergeist

  The Haunted Cubicle

  Daniel M. Strickland

  "You don't have a soul, Doctor.

  You are a soul.

  You have a body, temporarily."

  —From A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Foreword

  The following novel is pure fantasy. No harm was done to actual physics, metaphysics, or theology in its creation. The characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to persons I crossed paths with in my 30 years of life spent in a camel-colored cubicle may not be completely coincidental, but it is unintentional. I cannot be held responsible for what comes out of the Mixmaster of my subconscious.

  1

  To die would be an awfully big adventure.

  —From Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

  There was a jarring jump cut in reality. Everything had been chaos—thrashing about and fighting for breath. Blackness had been closing in, the constricting iris of a lens, consuming her vision. Then chaos, without transition, became complete calm. A riot of colored lights blinked into view everywhere at once. Wildly-hued, transparent, overlapping, mostly-geometric shapes appearing in all directions. Was this a psychedelic dream or the worst migraine optic flashes ever?

  The relief of surviving battled with the panic of being left with this weird form of blindness. What was an artist without her eyes? She could not differentiate a ceiling or walls or furniture or specific light sources. Everything glowed. Nothing appeared solid, layer after layer of transparencies, going on forever, as if surrounded by a holographic Technicolor x-ray. She reached up to touch her eyes. She didn’t feel her face or her hands touching her face. Did she even have hands? It seemed as though she moved something. Phantom limbs? That’s when she realized that there was no sense of touch registering anywhere. Not the sensation of numbness, but nothing. Paralyzed and blind?

  She wailed. She heard no sound, which further fueled her burgeoning hysteria. The wild colors before her shimmered faintly but noticeably. Trying to collect herself, she closed her eyes. Nothing changed. Either she had no eyelids or they were already closed. She attempted to take a deep breath. She didn’t seem to be breathing either. Now she flailed wildly and screamed, abandoning rational thought to raw animal emotion and expression.

  After a considerable while she stopped, having had enough. A good tantrum provides a certain catharsis, but it wasn’t helping the situation. She felt none of the normal physical effects of hysteria. No jitters from the rush of adrenaline. No puffy eyes or ragged-out throat.

  Perhaps she should try a more rational exploration of her situation. She could not conceive how this was the result of any physical condition. If this were a lucid dream, surely to God she would have awoken by now. She would have pinched herself, except she couldn’t find a self to pinch. Psychotic break? Being calm and rational hadn’t made it go away either. She felt panic building, threatening to consume her once more.

  She kept it at bay by taking inventory. First, there was this kaleidoscopic sight. She looked around slowly. As she did, she realized that her vision was not limited to the view in front of her. She “saw” in all directions at the same time, looking around being an act of focus, not motion.

  Not physical focus like a camera but mental focus. Whatever she fixed on, at any distance, she perceived with perfect clarity through all the intervening layers. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking at, but she saw anything she picked out, anywhere. It occurred to her that maybe she was moving to the object rather than visually zooming in on it, but somehow she sensed that was not the case.

  She tried to look down at herself, but she only saw the endless transparent layers. She waved her hand in front of her face. Well, she waved them in her current field of vision, since she didn’t know the actual location of her face. An eerie little jet of multi-colored plasma waved in front of her. Huh. Well, no nails to polish. She waved both hands before her face and there were two jets.

  Oddly, this triggered a perfect memory of her niece, lying in her crib, watching her own hands waving before her face with amazement. A baby. She stopped for a moment to consider but shook it off before she got too far. There would be plenty of time for philosophy later, or not. Physically exploring this… this whatever, kept the hysteria at bay while considering the implications would not.

  She wondered if producing a third hand was possible. That thought disturbed her, so she left that experiment for later. Next she brought her hands together, which did not result in any sensation of touch but did produce discernible interference patterns in the light. Intuitively, she recognized different designs in the interference as sensations. She played with her hands, creating familiar hatching, cross-hatching and stippling patterns by causing them to interact in different ways. The meanings of each of these displays were instinctually obvious to her. She laughed with delight when she found a touch that produced what she somehow knew to be a tickle.

  As with her screams, her laughter was not recognizable as sound, but produced a faint shimmer in the air, radiating in all directions. Deaf as well? Damn. She was beyond panic at this point, like a shell-shocked soldier wandering around the battlefield looking for her arm.

  She had no idea if there was air around her, since she wasn’t breathing. For convenience, she thought of it as air. Vibrations in the air were sound, so she listened. She heard nothing nearby (or saw any sound or… whatever). She had made so much noise. Did anybody or anything out there hear her? The idea terrified and exhilarated her. She decided to err on the side of caution and to try to be extremely quiet. It was a natural inclination for her not to draw attention to herself, but in this case she had an exceedingly good reason. Us babies need to be careful.

  She cautiously surveyed her surroundings. Upon a more deliberate inspection, she noted differences in the patterns of light around her. The majority was static: a fixed pattern of standing waves. These were the most common and the most immediate, completely surrounding her. She could “see” through them by focusing beyond them. Further out, more interesting patterns dotted the landscape. These patterns swirled with flowing and pulsing colors. She picked one and focused on it. Astonished, she realized that she was seeing more than the standard spectrum, a whole enormous array of nameless colors. How many tubes of paint would it take to paint that? What a trip!

  Energy. What she saw was energy. She was not sure how she could be so certain of this, but she was sensing electromagnetic energy in every wavelength. Beyond that, perhaps she was sensing gravity, and the weak and strong atomic forces. The energy equivalent of matter as well? Who knew? At this point she just needed to be able to make sense of what she saw.

  A concentration of lively patterns caught her attention as it shifted in the chaos. The mass unfolded and separated from another shape, moved briefly in one direction, and made a 90-degree turn. Then the form moved in a straight line until it came to a dense angular collection of cra
zy lights. Streams of a single color of living light flowed through boxy-shaped static structures and reminded her of blood moving through veins. The stream came from a chaotic weave of tributaries that extended in every direction in a plane beneath her. Why did it seem to be beneath her? She felt as if she had a sense of up and down, but she definitely didn’t sense a pull in any direction. She felt weightless, with no sense of reclining or sitting or standing.

  The moving pattern touched the other briefly, gathered something, and then made it’s way back to where it started. The familiarity of this scene hit her like a snow cone brain freeze. Could she be witnessing someone getting up from their desk and going to the printer to retrieve a printout? The thought brought her back around from the dispassionate survey of her surroundings to a more existential question. Where the hell was this? Did Hell come with high-speed laser printers?

  Somewhere deep inside, she already knew the answer to that question. Was she lying in bed at Baptist Memorial, full of tubes, experiencing an extended coma dream? This didn’t seem fluid enough to be a dream. Too strangely concrete. Insanely delusional? She felt too lucid, confused as hell but lucid. Crazy people probably always thought they were sane. Out-of-body experience? It didn’t mesh with any of the descriptions she had read. She floated, but the view did not resemble their descriptions.

  Time to stop avoiding the obvious possibility. She didn’t feel dead. As if anyone but the dead knew how that felt. She didn’t want to consider it, but she definitely remembered the blackness closing in on her as she struggled to breathe. Is this what comes after? The afterlife? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Sheol? Nirvana? Where the hell are the blessed angels? Or the god-forsaken devils? Someone with a few damn answers, please!

  There was no one. Freakin’ nothing but the freakin’ light show. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would please at this time, extinguish all smoking materials. Turn off your cell phones, dispose of any preconceived notions of the afterlife, and return your seat to the upright and locked position. Queue the spooky music. You’re on a plane ride straight into the Twilight Zone.

  She felt another well-deserved spaz attack coming. Since her earlier hissy fit hadn’t cleared anything up or even provided the visceral satisfaction of physical exhaustion, she decided instead to try yoga. There weren’t muscles to stretch or any actual breathing going on, but she mentally went through the familiar ritual to find her center. She found it much easier than usual. Normally she struggled with meditation. Returning to the object of meditation was the problem. When she cleared her mind, ideas popped full-grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. Like Athena, her ideas were brilliant bad-asses and not to be ignored. Usually a brain storming frenzy resulted and not blissful peace.

  Not this time. Without physical distraction or any use for mental ones, her mind stilled, completely unfocused but crystal clear. She watched everything, everywhere at once, as her yogi said, for the source of all light.

  And there it was.

  Not in any single direction, like the proverbial bright light at the end of a tunnel, but everywhere at once. It was in everything and everything was of it. Not frightening or awe-inspiring, it just was. To say it though, was not right, due to it being the singular case. Two distinct aspects existed simultaneously within The Everything. A cosmic yin-yang, the two were singing a song in two-part harmony. Forget that there was no actual sound. In her mind, they serenaded her with a duet.

  The Blazing Star sang a frenzied song of exaltation, of raw creative power urging her to come and join the force that builds stars and galaxies. Together they would construct matter out of energy and tear elementary particles apart in a continuous cycle of generation and decay for eternity.

  The Black Hole’s soothing song of peace suggested she throw off her metaphysical yoke to find the ultimate release. Accept its embrace, give herself to become the raw material of creation and become one with the universe in the most fundamental way, the ultimate upcycle.

  Though as different as heavy metal and country, the two songs wove together in an exquisite counterpoint. They each were oh so sweet in their own way, promising so much and asking so little—only a choice. They made their cases, pulling her in her both directions at once. Ulysses strapped to the mast, she endured the Sirens’ song. Unlike the Sirens’ song, this song was not an irresistible compulsion, but a compelling invitation to make the ultimate exercise of free will. The smoothest sales pitches you ever heard. Each song offered a seductive promise that was hard to resist, but if she chose, then that (as they say) would be that. She was not ready to choose. The songs receded, but they didn’t disappear. They hung around in the periphery, just waiting to be called again to make their cases. Their chorus could be ignored but not forgotten.

  Her meditation broken, she considered the implications. This madness, this delusion, this place, was the universal retention area. Soak in or evaporate. Call us when you decide. Two choices.

  Two choices she knew of. Are there others? Maybe not choosing. Is that possible? Are there other souls around that haven’t decided? What if I never pick? Then I guess I’d be stuck here in Neverland. A ghost. She hated choosing. It was one of the many character flaws she kept in inventory. She took indecision to extremes unless forced. Breakfast consisted of yogurt and toast every morning, not because she loved it, but so she didn’t have to choose.

  She didn’t have to pick now. Apparently the offer remained open for a time or maybe forever, with the advertisements buzzing in her ear for eternity. Thank God. Heh. Besides, there was a whole existence to explore here. Nothing like keeping busy to avoid a tough decision.

  She made a 360-degree scan with the assumption that she saw a different version of a familiar reality. Accepting this assumption virtually confirmed it to be true. She recognized shapes as her cubicle and desk. Thankfully, her body was not sprawled on the floor. There must be a delay. Ladies and gentlemen, a mandatory waiting period is required between death and resurrection, take a number and wait. Three days is how long it takes, right? She recognized the familiar aisles of her work place out beyond her immediate cubicle. Great. For whatever reason she was haunting her office. She supposed it was because she died there. At least now it wasn’t so uniformly beige. Different materials presented different patterns in a riot of colors. With time she supposed she would recognize the patterns’ connections to familiar objects.

  As she looked around, she became comfortable reconciling most of what she saw with the more familiar world. She observed the monochrome flow of AC power moving through the wiring in the floor and the ceiling. The florescent lights tasted (tasted?) even flatter and colder than ever, but the people…

  They glowed and pulsed in complex woven patterns of living energy, each as individual as fingerprints. Auras. She had always thought the talk of auras was either bologna or (if feeling generous) an overworked metaphor. Dude, your aura is so totally blue today. But there they were. She wondered if there were people (living people) who really could sense what she saw.

  She studied one of the auras, sitting at their desk. With a pinch of self-delusion, she pretended the choice was happenstance. He sat at his desk across the main aisle from the printer/copier and behind the column which cohabitated his cubicle.

  Martin was the latest in a string of men she admired from afar. Admiration continued from afar until they noticed her admiring them, they demonstrated they were not worthy, or they became attached to someone else. She was a monogamous stalker. She first came to admire him when she sat in front of him at the latest corporate motivational rally. Far from inspiring, the sessions had the opposite effect on her. They were obliviously geared towards extraverts and made her most uncomfortable with the implication that characteristics at the core of her being were “challenges” that must be overcome with the help of their exclusive seven step plan. “I challenge you to be more than you are!”

  Martin had sat behind her with his buddy Wesley. He made remarks under his breath, and Wesley chuckled without making a sound
. His quips and impersonations of the speaker made the whole thing bearable. She wasn’t the only one. Alice, who sat next to her, also found him amusing, although she tried hard not to show it. She wanted to give him a smile, but the usual fears stopped her: the dread that he wouldn’t smile back, the worry that he would self-consciously stop the commentary, the anxiety that she might have a bit of breakfast in her teeth. So many fears.

  It sounded silly now, to be afraid of such things. Once you were dead, social anxiety was unimportant to say the least. Ironic. So much fear, but she had never gotten around to being properly afraid of death. It’s often what you were not watching out for that gets you. Like the car that runs you down because you jumped out in the street to avoid the piano falling out of the window or choking to death on a bit of organic goat cheese which you were eating to avoid slowly destroying your body with unhealthy food.

  She watched him. His aura seemed familiar to her as though she already knew it. She watched the steady pulse and swirl of the patterns and colors that were Martin. He seemed lonely and discontent. Was it insanity-induced delusion, or did her new senses afford her an interpretation of the auras, as though reading cosmic body language?

  I should go visit him. The thought gave her a thrill of fear and excitement. Then it occurred to her that she had not moved from the spot where she first became aware of her new condition.

  Could she move around in this holographic Color Field painting? Maybe she was stuck in this spot. If she moved around, how would it work? Would she sprout ectoplasmic legs and walk? Would she float around all ghostly, or would she disappear from one place and reappear elsewhere in an instant?

  She tried to picture herself right outside Martin’s cubicle. Nothing happened. She pictured legs, sprouted a couple of appendages, and moved them across the floor in a walking motion. This produced the sensation of an interaction but no movement. She focused on moving toward Martin, and she moved. It surprised her when she bumped into her cubicle wall. Wasn’t flowing through walls as if they weren’t there supposed to be a perk of being a ghost? That’s how it worked in the movies. She felt a strong resistance as she touched the wall. She experimented. With force (force of what, will?) she pushed her way into the wall, but it was painful. At least she interpreted the sensation as pain. She had no doubt it was bad for her.