The Rearing Unicorn
Donkey’s years later, the heart sings when it recognises a friend who survived.
I had forgotten what name it had, and I was ashamed of this for years. It was an unassuming clerkship droid of cheap plastisteel, its edges worn smooth, the dielectric elastomer tendons rasping from time’s ravages.
I had been crying on the bench outside the school. It stopped beside me and kindly inquired if it could help. Among sobs, I explained that my wit-imp was dead again, and I had been cut off from my favourite VeeAr streams.
It told me not to worry and to meet with it the next day at the same spot, which I did. The faded book, musty with age, the machinoid handed me was titled “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. I asked what a Lion was, but it just smiled.
From then on, we would get together, and he would gift me other ancient tomes with words of wondrous places, magical beings and invincible spaceships that helped me fall asleep after my parents’ shouting matches.
But soon, discord grew in the Terran empire, and the Troubles spread, with half of our Colonies seceding and teaming up with the rebel AIs, and my father left Ma. In the mayhem, many droids also disappeared, and so did my friend.
After fourteen years in the Navy, being shuttled from across the Arm’s length and breadth, I am one of the handful of early-on recruits who survived the Wars and am invited to the new Confederacy’s grand reception on my home world as a full Captain.
What name it had, I now recall.
It is imprinted on a splendid ivory invitation card with a silky overlay and a tiny hologram of Jewel the Unicorn rearing in a corner. I am part of a group of Nether Colonies’ high officers at the vaulted entrance to the former gardens of the Terran embassy.
As our tired red sun finally slips behind Landers’ Hills and a column of ladies in gala evening dresses passes by, it floats down the imposing marble steps, shimmering in its exquisite spherical housing, and stops before me.
The Confederacy’s first minister of Culture, the Right Honourable Biblio R. Suldrun hugs me with its tractor beam.
The story above was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2024 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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