Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle by Daniel M. Strickland

“Martin, come see this.” He followed her through the door. Once on the other side of the door, they were in an elevator. It dinged and descended, while an instrumental version of “Blackbird” played in the background. Alice smiled and hummed along.
    The elevator door opened into a room filled with exotic electronics and people in white lab coats. Martin walked up to a large shuttered window in the center of the back wall. It opened. On the other side of the glass two streams of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light collided. He didn’t question how he knew what he was watching, he just knew. He saw particles spinning and corkscrewing off in all different directions. Their brightly colored trails somehow contained more colors than there were words for. As he watched the swirling hues, he began to notice they vaguely defined a shape. When he recognized that the shape was a human figure, it coalesced into the image of Millicent Able holding a small paper plate with a piece of birthday cake on it. She offered him the slice of cake. Then the shutters closed again with a startling bang.

9
     

     
    The human soul weighs 21 grams, smells like grilled vegetables, looks like a wrinkled tartan quilt, and sounds like bridge traffic.
    — From Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
     
    Millie fled to her cubicle and sat (or whatever the right verb was) studying Martin while recharging her solar batteries. She studied the subtle changes in his aura as he took in the image, first briefly at the printer, then at length sitting at his desk. She wondered what would happen next in their courtship. The light show that represented a giggle in her current incarnation rippled around her. What a ridiculous thought, a courtship. Like Romeo and Juliet, they were from two different worlds. This thought caused another ripple.
    Martin put away the printed page with the image she had created on the copier and began to work on his computer. They were from two different worlds all right. Was it possible to stay in this place and have a relationship with a living soul or with another ghost for that matter? Where were the other ghosts? She hadn’t encountered any, but then she hadn’t been looking.
    She had spent most of her time studying the office. Her own presence not withstanding, the office seemed an unlikely place for a haunting. Other than the office, she had glanced around the building and the immediate surroundings but had not come across another ghost. She supposed most souls made their choice right off and left. The necessity of either the protection of the field surrounding their creations or enough energy to withstand the drain of being outside would discourage any remaining ghost from wandering the streets.
    Maybe she hadn’t seen any because there weren’t any. Perhaps each soul got her own universe, and this was her own private waiting room. The thought made her lonely. Millie confessed to being a bit of a hermit, but the thought of being alone in the universe dropped a scary, hollow feeling in what used to be the pit of her stomach. She decided to try to find other ghosts.
    She half-heartedly watched Martin as she considered where the best place would be to find ghosts. Perhaps a graveyard, she thought? At first she ruled that out since her assumption is that the soul leaves the body at the time of death. But it could be that the body is itself a store of energy since it was used in the act of creation. She couldn’t imagine a soul haunting a body in a casket six feet under the ground, unable to absorb the sun’s energy, only sitting, and contemplating The Choice. She knew that much of what we call insanity resulted from structural problems or chemical imbalances in the physical brain, but surely spending years buried in the dirt with your decaying body caused a special madness. Encountering a deranged banshee would be a nightmare. She decided she didn’t want to look there. Not as a first choice at