Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle by Daniel M. Strickland Page A

levels of energy she did not have. She scanned Martin’s cubicle looking for inspiration. She saw no chads in the punch, no dust on the shelf, and no trash in the can. Awesome, the cleaning crew cleaned. Must be somebody new.
    Pulling her gaze back to widen the search for message material, she came to the copier. She could make copies. She hadn’t tried it, but she knew it was possible. Her memory of the little pulses of power created by pressing the buttons, their texture and color, was as clear as if she were watching it now. The cover had been left open a crack, leaving room for a message to be constructed on the glass. She needed will power, her storehouse of energy, and building materials. First she considered the toner, but it was well contained inside the machine. Then she found dust and carpet fibers between the back of the machine and a cubicle wall. Guess the cleaning crew hadn’t been that thorough.
    There was plenty raw material there, but did she have the juice to lift enough of it? As she contemplated how frustrating it was to have supreme perception and memory but such a limited ability to do anything, a drifting dust mote caught her attention.
    She watched the tiny collection of orderly energy patterns that constituted her view of solid matter as it drifted lazily on the air currents between the wall and the machine. Then it veered from its course and accelerated straight up through the gap, over the top of the machine, and then out into the room.
    She would not have to lift the material from the floor to top. She only needed to coax them over to the vent in the floor, let them ride the current up, and then nudge them into the gap between the lid and glass. Frustration gave way to excitement. It would be difficult, but not impossible. Millie was willing to attack the difficult with vigor. It was the amount of impossible that was frustrating.
    She still wasn’t sure she had enough energy. She studied the air currents; the swirling flows and eddies. By applying slight amounts of energy here and there, she could nudge those around as well, causing them to lift the particles and deposit them on the glass. She got even more excited. Figuring out how was always her favorite part of any project.
    She committed to the plan. She realized she should have considered other possibilities, but she found the challenge too exciting to resist. She could do it. The message still needed to be brief. If she had to, she would plunder the energy from another of her items. What the hell, you only live (or exist as incorporeal consciousness) once, and maybe not for much longer.
    Sunrise was near when she felt she had studied the problem until she wasn’t getting anything more out of observation. Time to do it. She flashed over to the copier.
    She slowed her perception to the minimum and began applying minute amounts of energy to swirling air currents. They swooped up a load of particles and carried them upward. She used measured little amounts of energy here and there to keep most of them on course and deposit them on the glass. Once she had a load on the glass, she began to multitask. She interlaced her attention between coaxing the material up the air currents and assembling the message.
    She had been so involved in figuring out how to build the message that she hadn’t thought much about the content. It was probably a pointless exercise anyway, but she didn’t care because the process of creating it was intoxicating. As she worked, she held the image in her mind of Martin’s aura and wove the message to be in harmony with it. It took little power to move the particles using the air currents, but it took time for them to make their way up over the machine and onto the glass. Being so far from her sanctuary drained her more than moving the material.
    She assembled “Help me, Martin. Can’t Sit. Can’t See,” on the glass, elegantly woven in fibers and dust. The font and the layout pleased her. Little juice remained in her