I’ve been trying to keep the story chapters down to a thousand word flash fiction, but I can’t do that with this one. This is a Teddy’s Odyssey.

Lana hadn’t suffered the severity of injuries her father had being under his coat during the long run through the burning forest. Grethu was now in the critical burn unit being treated while she sat on a bed in pediatric emergency being examined by a doctor. “I think you are a very lucky young lady,” declared the doctor. It hadn’t been luck. During the run through the forest, Grethu had his arm wrapped around the girl, with Mr. Buckles held close enough to her face to blast cool filtered air from his emergency air filtration system located in his muzzle, and saving her lungs from being burned by the intense heat of the forest fire. The breathing unit in his muzzle was designed to be used by a child to survive a smoke filled house long enough for rescue to arrive. “Mr. Buckles saved me,” said Lana. The doctor smiled as he finished his examination. “Well, he’s a very fine bear.” Lana had Mr. Buckles clutched to her chest. He couldn’t connect with the doctor’s mind to tell him he was the most advanced miniature quantum A.I. computer ever built by the Aedens, or that he was designed to aid children with learning, emotional support, advice, and emergency survival. Luca had manually set his neural transmitter to the lowest setting to prevent neural bleed-over to Tan, as Jack’s A.I. had inadvertently done. He would only be able to connect if he were in physical contact with someone, or if the person were close and had a relatively simple mind. “I’m going to take care of him forever,” said Lana. Mr. Buckles sighed. He had already told Lana that he belonged to Luca, but she was too young to understand. She wanted to keep him, but he couldn’t allow that to happen. He loved Luca. His existence had begun when Luca’s mother had activated him and instructed him to scan the baby inside her. His name hadn’t been Mr. Buckles back then. He was A.I. serial number 44583933AL0. He had been upgraded seven times since and was now officially A.I. 44583933AL7. His first scan of Luca had been the barest brush against Luca’s pre-natal mind. The boy had been perfect, and he had loved the unborn child immediately. He maintained that gentle connection with Luca’s mind and provided daily medical updates to Luca’s mother. His existence and connection to Luca would continue until someday in the far future when Luca’s mind would go dark. Mr. Buckles would then save Luca’s life files to a data disk before permanently deactivating himself. The doctor left the room and a nurse entered. The nurse lifted Lana down and put her into a wheel chair. She pushed Lana out into the hall and down to the nurse’s station. The nurse parked Lana next to the big desk and went to get the paperwork to transfer Lana up to the pediatric ward. Mr. Buckles searched for a plan to get back to Luca, but there were too many variables. He would have to take advantage of each situation as it arose. He looked up at Lana and felt a moment of guilt, then turned off his ethics sub-routine. “Sleep,” he pushed the thought into her mind. Lana’s eyes closed and her hand loosened its grip on him. He pushed a last thought into her mind before he fell to the floor. “Forget.” The nurse returned and didn’t notice him on the floor, and then Lana was gone. He sat on the floor waiting. He could have gotten up and walked away, but the motor servers in his joints were to be used sparingly, as they took considerable battery power to use. The feature was intended for use with children when they were babies and unable to move independently. The A.I. could move itself back to the child if it were accidently separated. Twenty minutes later another nurse noticed him on the floor. She was used to children forgetting their toys in the emergency room and sat him up on the desk. He sat there for nearly an hour before the same nurse returned and took him to one of the rooms. There was a little boy lying on the bed with a rash on his face. The nurse handed him to the little boy to distract him from scratching at the rash. He didn’t try to talk with the boy, but he did scan the boy’s rash and determined it was a minor allergic reaction to something he’d eaten. A doctor came into the room and prescribed a cream for the boy. The nurse returned to give the parents the discharge orders. He pushed a thought into the boy’s mind. “Take me.” Mr. Buckles ethics sub-routine turned back on. He was only allowed to turn it off for very short emergency situations, usually involving the physical defense of Luca. He had never needed to use the stun gun embedded behind his right eye. It couldn’t do any real damage, but it could deliver enough of a shock to make a potential kidnapper let go of Luca and give him a chance to escape. The non-audible alarm warning him that use of his neural ability was forbidden to be used on anyone without their knowledge was sounding in his head. He tried to turn his ethics sub-routine back off, but it refused. He careful considered his choices and decided, he loved Luca more than he cared about following the ethics sub-routine. I love Luca, he said to himself, but that shouldn’t be possible. He was designed to protect, teach, nurture, and comfort, but not to love. He searched through all his data files. There was no sub-routine instructing him to love. Why did he love Luca? Where was the thought coming from? The little boy and his parents were leaving the emergency room now. He couldn’t allow the boy to take him to a vehicle where he could be trapped for days, or weeks. He pushed a thought into the boy’s mind. “You don’t like me, put me on that table.” The boy tossed him on the table as he walked past. This was good, he’d made it out to where he might find the right person to help him get back to Luca. Then a thought occurred to him. He didn’t know where Luca was. He knew they were eventually going to the RS-40, but he didn’t know where that was either. A child approached and reached out to him, but he didn’t feel like being picked up. He pushed a thought at the child. “I bite, go away.” The child snatched her hand back and fled crying. Mr. Buckles heard the ethics alarm and chose to ignore it, which shouldn’t be possible. He mentally shrugged and looked for something to do while he waited, so began a full diagnostic of his memory system. The results came back several seconds later, there were two fused circuits in his quantum core that shouldn’t be connected. His sub-conscious was now connected to his cognitive higher functions. The intense heat of the fire must have fused the connection. It was getting dark now, the day had slipped by without him even noticing. Nobody had come to try and pick him up… oops… he had the message ‘I bite, go away’ on a continuous loop. He hadn’t meant to do that, he was just… grumpy? He wasn’t programmed to be grumpy. He turned the looped message off. A man pushing a trashcan and a broom started to approach. He sent the strongest signal he could at the man. “I’m not here, I’m not here.” The man walked past without even glancing at the stuffed bear. Mr. Buckles let out a silent breath of relief. Ending up in a trashcan would be a terrible end. The evening wore on and the waiting room slowly emptied until only a young couple was sitting at the far end of the room, too far away for him to send a subconscious message. He watched as the young couple was finally called back to a treatment room, and then he was alone. Several hours passed before anyone entered the waiting room again. A man in green medical scrubs came through a door off to the side. He had a backpack slung over his shoulder and was headed towards the exit. The man must be getting off shift and going home. Mr. Buckles pushed a thought at the man as he walked past. “I would make a good gift.” The man stopped and looked down at the bear. “Someone left their stuffed bear, well, their loss my gain, this would be great for my kid.” The man picked the bear up and stuffed it under his arm. Mr. Buckles turned his olfactory sensors off, the man needed a shower, badly. The man followed the sidewalk and continued away from the hospital. Good, getting into a vehicle could end in disaster. Mr. Buckles saw the city as it truly was, not the neural fantasy of the Sunth, or the imaginative spiraled city of a neural induced Ruk dream. His brain was a quantum core and only saw facts. The city was a typical spaceport colony of steel buildings that would be reintegrated and stored in the mother ship for the next planet they stopped to harvest. The streets were hard packed dirt, lined with wooden walkways, and plenty of landing craft scattered about to indicate this was a spacefaring race that lived here only temporarily. In the distance at the edge of the ridge surrounding the valley were excavation equipment the size of which dwarfed anything Mr. Buckles had on file for the Aedens. These were machines that could easily level mountains. Shuttles were constantly lifting off and landing, and for the most part, he thought the city ugly. He scanned for the ‘Great Tree’ that Jack and Luca had talked about, but there was none. It was just another of the Sunth’s neural fantasies. There was plenty of Sunth trees, but all of them had a sleek shuttlecraft parked next to each tree. The roots of each Sunth tree stretched into the adjacent ship, as if they were only outside to do a bit of sunbathing, and would soon return to the interior of the specially designed spacecraft. The man walked near enough to one of the ships for Mr. Buckles to see inside. The roots led to a large central column inside the ship. Mr. Buckles understood. The central column was where the tree usually resided, but had been moved outside to gather needed nutrients while on the planet. The procedure to move the trees in and out of the ships must be time consuming and requiring thousands of botanists to perform. This was why they couldn’t escape the lightning storm. Once outside, they were in it for the long term and vulnerable. The man stopped and turned to enter a building made of sheet metal. Mr. Buckles glanced up at the sign over the door. ‘The Oak Lounge’. The man pulled the door open and entered the dim interior. Mr. Buckles scanned the room. It was a bar. The man took a seat at the long bar and propped Mr. Buckles up on the counter. The next hour was boring as the man drank foul looking liquid from dirty glasses. A news report on a television mounted to the wall attracted his attention. Mr. Buckles used his directional hearing to listen to the report. “The hero Aeden boys of the Silthon Forest Fire, and our newest citizens, arrived this afternoon at their new home on the RS-40 Ocean Ship.” The image on the television zoomed in on Jack and Luca. A reporter pushed a microphone at the boys. “How are you feeling after your harrowing experience?” “We’re doing okay,” replied Jack. “I lost my teddy bear in the fire,” added Luca. Mr. Buckles activated his leg servos and stood. “I’m here, I’m here,” he silently shouted. The man turned his head and stared at the bear. Mr. Buckles turned around and glared at the man. The man’s blood alcohol level was sufficient for his mind to be pliable enough for complex commands. The ethics alarm started to sound, but he angrily silenced it. He didn’t care if it was not allowed to manipulate the mind of this man. “You will take me to the RS-40.” The man let out a drunken chuckle. The command was ridiculous and easily ignored. The man didn’t make enough for expensive flights out to the Ocean Ship. Mr. Buckles scanned the man’s mind for alternatives and heard a whisper from the man’s subconscious. “The only way you’re getting there is if you mail yourself.” Of course, the mail. He remembered the stack of mail that Tan had been reading the night before the fire. He pushed another thought into the man’s mind. “You will mail me to Luca at the RS-40. NOW!” The man didn’t immediately jump up and obey, there was still a rational part of his brain that told him not to listen to a teddy bear. Mr. Buckles walked across the bar to stand in front of the man. He considered using his stun gun, but that might sober the man up too much. Mr. Buckles looked at the man’s name tag. The man was a lab tech assistant. Yes, that was the answer, the man had entered the medical field, and though he hadn’t risen far, he was there because he had always dreamed of being a doctor and wanted to help people. His empathy could be used to make him do what Mr. Buckles wanted. Mr. Buckles pulled the man into V.R. and fabricated a burning forest with Luca wandering through it, his face smudged with soot and ash. The V.R. Luca was crying out for his teddy bear. “He can’t escape, he needs his teddy bear,” said Mr. Buckles. “Help him.” Mr. Buckles pushed the man back out of the V.R. The man jumped off his bar stool and looked into the glass he was drinking from. “Good Great Tree, what’s in this stuff?” The man stared at the bear for a long moment, then grabbed him and left the bar. Only the outer lobby of the post office was open. The man filled out a shipping label, placed the correct amount of stamps on the label, and wrapped it around the bear. He took the bear over to the mail bin. Mr. Buckles pushed a thought at the man. “Forget.” Mr. Buckles felt the man’s mind suddenly push back at him like a tidal wave, and then the man was inside the V.R. “I might be drunk, but I’m not stupid. You had me going for a while, but I know what you are now. You’re the reason we stopped using children’s A.I.’s. There’s a glitch, it’s rare, but this happens sometimes. I’m going to send you to that Aeden kid just to get rid of you, but if I ever see you again I’ll rip you apart.” And then Mr. Buckles was falling down the mail chute into a bin of small boxes and mail. He had under-estimated the strength of the Ruk mind, a mistake he wouldn’t make again. He was where he wanted to be, but it could have ended very badly. The next two weeks were a series of conveyor belts, sitting in white mail bins for hours, truck rides, and three plane rides. The worst of the trip was one night while he was sitting in a mail bin waiting. Two young men pulled him out of the bin, they were laughing at something they only knew the joke to. He scanned them. They were under the influence of some drug. “Let’s scare the crap out of some kid,” said one of the young men. “Do it,” replied the other. The first young man set him down on a railing, and retrieved what looked like a bottle of red nail polish from his pocket. The young man then painted Mr. Buckles eyes red. He thought about trying to defend himself, but decided not to risk another incident with a Ruk mind. He silently endured the punishment. “Ha, good one,” said the second young man. The first young man threw him back into the mail bin. Eventually he was loaded onto the last plane ride he would have to take. He was in the air for almost twelve hours before the plane began to descend. The plane touched down, and slowed to a halt. The cargo bay doors opened and his temperature sensors indicated a tropical environment. This had to be it, Luca was somewhere close. The crate he was in was brought off the plane and he peeked through the wooden slates, and if he could have gasped in surprise, he would have. The massive bulk of the RS-40 was just on the other side of the runway. How had they even found a place big enough to land that thing? He couldn’t even see the front or back of the ship, it was too far away in the distance. The mail crate was loaded on a flat cargo truck and drove across the tarmac to a cargo ramp. Mr. Buckles could see other planes and shuttles on the runway. He continued to watch through the slates in the crate at all the activity. The truck drove up the ramp. This was it, he was almost back to Luca. He expected the truck to stop immediately and begin off-loading gear, but it didn’t. The truck drove up another ramp and onto a four lane road with traffic coming and going both directions – it was like driving through a tunnel in a mountain. The truck drove for twenty-five minutes before taking an off ramp to a lower area. Mr. Buckles tried to imagine how a ship could be so large that it had its own highway inside. There were no Aeden ships that were even close in comparison. He calculated the distance they’d gone based on his guess of 40 mph for 25 minutes. The answer was 16.6 miles. How big was this Ruk ship? The crate was off loaded, but took another hour before someone opened it. He was removed, along with all the other mail and put on a conveyor belt. At the end of the conveyor belt, boys were sorting the packages. He scanned the boys and estimated most of them were around sixteen years old. The boys worked quickly and sorted all the packages. He was put into a large box with the number 27 on the side. Another boy came an hour later and shoved all the mail from box 27 into a mail bag. Mr. Buckles servos activated and he wiggled slightly in his excitement. He was so close. The boy took an elevator up to a deck with ‘Deck 27’ painted on the opposite wall of the elevator. The boy entered a cafeteria room and went to stand in line at the grill. Mr. Buckles seriously considered zapping the boy with his stun gun. The boy took his food and sat at a table. Mr. Buckles was at the top of the mail bag as the boy sat the bag down on the table and he fell halfway out of the bag. The boy hadn’t taken two bites when a girl of the same age, and in the same postal uniform stopped at the table. “Hi, Juk,” said the girl. The boy dropped his sandwich and stood up, and in the process knocked his drink onto Mr. Buckles. The liquid soaked his fur. His computer inside was waterproof, but his fur wasn’t. The fur soaked the liquid in like a sponge. “No, no, no… that’s twice this month I’ve ruined a package.” The boy dabbed at Mr. Buckles with a napkin. The girl giggled and leaned over the table. “Just pull the shipping label off and drop it in front of the door where it goes. Nobody will know it was you that delivered a damaged package.” The boy nodded, ripped the shipping label off and read it before stuffing Mr. Buckles back into the bag. He stammered something unintelligible to the girl and fled. Their next stop was a restroom. The boy ran Mr. Buckles under the faucet to try and clean him off, but it only made the situation worse. The ash and soot from the forest fire turned into a mess of matted fur and mud. The boy gave up and grabbed the hopelessly filthy bear and ran back out of the restroom. Two hallways later and a trail of muddy water behind them, the boy slid to a stop in front of a door. The boy dropped Mr. Buckles in front of the door, rang the doorbell, and ran away. *** Jack was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework while Tan sat across from him memorizing menu’s for his new job. Luca was still sulking and in his room where he hid most of the time. The doorbell rang a pleasant melody. Jack jumped up. “I’ll get it, it might be Kalu.” Tan looked up. “It’s a school night.” “I know, I know,” said Jack as he ran to the front door of their new apartment. Jack opened the door… and screamed in terror. He fell onto his backside and scrambled backwards to get away from the apparition standing in the doorway. Tan was at his side a moment later, his fists raised and ready to deal with whatever the threat was. Tan froze and looked in horror as a soot covered and soaking wet Mr. Buckles walked into the apartment. Tan looked beyond the bear at the trail of water leading down the hall. “He’s come back from the dead for revenge,” cried Jack. Tan reached down and pulled Jack a few more feet away from the bear. “Why is his eyes red?” Jack scrambled to his feet. “He’s a demon, he’s here to kill us for leaving him to die in the forest fire.” The bear continued to advance, and Jack and Tan continued to retreat. Tan shook his head. “There’s no way he swam 2,500 miles to get here… I mean… they can’t do that, can they?” “No, they can’t” shouted Jack, visibly shaking now. Luca came out of his room to see what the shouting was about. He saw Mr. Buckles and never hesitated. He ran to the bear and dropping to his knees, scooped the muddy bear up in his arms. “You came back, I’m so sorry… I’m sorry… I’m sorry…” Luca smothered the bear with kisses as he continued to say, I’m sorry, over and over again. Tan turned his head to Jack while keeping an eye on the muddy fire-scorched bear. “Jack, has this ever happened before… has there… ummm… ever been a supernatural event with one of these A.I.’s?” Jack shook his head. “No, I would have heard about it.” “Maybe we should go into the V.R. and talk with his A.I.,” suggested Tan. “Oh heck no! I’m not going anywhere near that thing,” said Jack. Luca turned to Tan and Jack. He held the bear out to them. “Mr. Buckles wants a hug.” Jack looked at the bear’s red eyes and jumped back another three feet. “You keep that evil thing away from me!” Luca giggled and hugged Mr. Buckles. “Come on, Mr. Buckles, you need a bath.” “Do it in the kitchen sink where I can keep an eye on both of you,” ordered Tan. Luca spun around and headed into the kitchen, his arms clutched around Mr. Buckles. Tan glanced at Jack. "Can you hear that?" "Yeah, it sounds like a cat purring," replied Jack.