Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle by Daniel M. Strickland Read Free Book Online Page B

recall, she was able to follow the roads to find her apartment.
    The apartment was empty, all of her furniture gone. She wasn’t that disappointed, because it was a remote possibility it would still be there. She wondered what had happened to her cat, William Catner. He was a good companion; she hoped someone had adopted him. A memory of sitting in the bay window with her cat got a brief review before it struck her that the built-in seat in the bay window was still there. She had spent a lot of time there, reading, sketching and watching the sunset. It would still be there and should be full of Millie karma. She got no sense of the energy field emitted by her objects while she scanned the apartment. She would have to visit IRL.
    The notion of going so far made her edgy. The spot was burned in her brain now, the memory of her apartment’s location perfect. She didn’t have to follow the route she used to find it; she could zoom straight to it. While looking at her window seat, she willed herself to go there, and she was there in a fraction of a second. Warp factor one, engage! She sensed other people’s essence, presumably the moving crew’s and the painters, already replacing her own. The only significant source left was the window seat. She sucked it dry and flashed back to her cubicle. Her energy stores were filled, but her home no longer hers.
    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