Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle Read Free Page B

from the shelf and putting them into the box. When they finished the shelf, they started with the desk and the drawers.
    At first, she just wished they would hurry, but as their work progressed it occurred to her they might take all her stuff. Would she have to follow her stuff, or was there enough energy in the floor and the desk to sustain her?
    She would have taken action if she could think of anything to do. They finished their task while she still feverishly tried to think of what to do. They went to the entrance to the cubicle, paused and leaned over to look under the desk, right at her. She held her breath. Not that she had breath, but she held it. Then they left, leaving the box on the chair.
    She was relieved they left her things, but she couldn’t get to the sweet spot on her chair. That troubled her. Her existence here was quite fragile if it depended on her stuff. She no longer had any immediate family to come and get it since the car crash took her parents, but sooner or later they would do something with it. Store it or throw it away, and the desk and chair would be inhabited by someone else. Would their energy replace hers or coexist? She was afraid she knew the answer to that one.
    She was beginning to see why there weren’t ghosts everywhere. If one of the songs wasn’t appealing enough to get an immediate decision, here was more motivation. Choose to die or fade away or… She would have shivered if she had anything to shiver. Perhaps ghosts were as invisible to her as they were to the living. She couldn’t see herself after all. But she saw no way to test the hypothesis at the moment.
    She returned to being annoyed about the box in her chair. Sitting on top of the box wasn’t as good. She pushed herself down into the box. The energy it took to cohabitate the solid objects was more than the benefit of contact with the seat of the chair, and it hurt. She tried the underside of the chair. Not as good. Could she move the box? She hadn’t tried to interact with the real world other than trying to pass through things. Or maybe this is the real world. Ooh, the world is an illusion. Take the blue pill. Anyway, she should at least try to move the box.
    How does an incorporeal being interact with physical objects? The stories of poltergeists throwing furniture around suggested the possibility—if any of those stories were true. Her attempts to physically push an object resulted in her passing into the object. She needed a different approach. Okay, let’s step back a bit, she thought. The difference between an object at rest and an object in motion is energy. Perhaps she could use the sweet sun juice she had stored.
    If imparting energy on an object were possible, could she control the form the energy took? The object might just spin or heat up or gain electrical charge. Atoms fuse and fission. Millie the Mighty, Dr. Manhattan!
    Beginning a chain reaction seemed unlikely since her things didn’t contain fissionable material. If she understood these things, it took a lot of power to fuse a significant amount of matter. It might be a good idea to keep it in mind. She had no idea how much power she had, but it seemed tiny.
    She decided to start small. A small, flat, disk laid on top of the desk. She judged it to be a chad from her hole punch. That should be light with little friction on the smooth desktop. So, she had her object picked, but now what? She concentrated on the image of pushing it with her finger. A tendril of living energy flowed from her toward the object and passed through it into the desk. Ouch. She tried again, focusing on the tip of her finger being solid. She didn’t press into the chad, but it also didn’t move. Bodily (as it were) interacting with an object didn’t work. She needed a different approach.
    Perhaps will power was the answer. She focused on the object and willed it to move. Nothing happened. She tried again. She concentrated so hard blood vessels would have burst it she had