A jerk studies sorcery. Somehow he acquires the power to summon and compel a unicorn to be his magical slave. She's pony-sized, with an intelligent aura, but I suspect she's a person, not just a magical creature. But I can't be sure at first--she refuses to talk, until, near the dream's climax, I meet her when her Wizardly Master's not around.

He makes his magical slave create time-forks that he knows will re-merge four years later, phenomenologically indistinguishable, and thus, to observers, the same stream--just with debatable events in its past. But he'll get to pick the route to the shared present that he likes best--with hidden advantages for him. A time-profiteer!

It half works. The forks do appear, he can choose... but one of the four-year forks has complications. It lasts SIX years before coming round to conditions roughly matching the other fork. That can't work; people will notice the date discrepancy. And at four years, events just don't match; it can't fuse.

So the mare does... something more. Two years into that six-year path, she wills another fork! And another a year later, and another six months later... an infinite sequence of changes with a firm, finite deadline at the four-year mark. Zeno's Paradox!

Each split causes a jolt you can feel--these are her nudges, not natural forks in history. She's jabbing time in the butt! When poked by a unicorn, time can't help but jump--but time resents it.

The tremors come closer and closer, just seconds apart now, till time feels rhythmic, then throbby, then grinding, then a roaring temporal sideways CRASH as a million forks fray into a frizz and slam into the other, simpler, four-year path. Timecrash! A long scary minute as they tangle and... coalesce into a single timeline. Stable.

More or less.

Strange to FEEL yourself go through a singularity. Sure not the quiet, slick re-merging that idiot planned--but it would've failed anyway. Two-year discrepancy!

The mare's creative sabotage does re-knit time--each branch four years long, reconcilable--but it was a rough ride to get here! And neither new branch is what the man really wanted.

Well, that's what he gets for treating a unicorn like a slave.

I want to interview that mare in depth. Resourceful! But the guy--trying, I think, to keep us from comparing magical notes (or falling in love, or... who knows?)--orders her out across town on a mission. She's compelled to go. I follow, determined to ask questions--though still unsure the she CAN talk.

At the very end of the dream--subjective hours after the first fork--I catch up. And get answers! She's open enough--once her captor's not around. "I don't talk to people who treat me like a thing." She describes how she came up with such a strange solution--"Once he forced me to make a path that wouldn't reunite on its own, I felt obliged to clean up the mess--and a single poke wouldn't heal it. I got a bit drastic! I'm just glad the timequake wasn't worse. But I think it's healing okay."

The folklore was naïve. Yeah, unicorns heal; but not just flesh.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Unicorn, timeforks, each shorter and uglier till you hit a crisis: echoes a My Little Pony show (the end of Season 5). Twilight (a stubborn genius at magic who's moralistic) sparks a revolt in a utopian village that's gone sour. The mayor, Starlight (a stubborn genius at magic who cuts moral corners) blames Twilight. So Starlight messes with time, trying to wreck Twi's community in revenge. Twi repairs time, Starlight twists it again... faster and faster. And every timefork where Twilight's friendless turns dystopian! In the end Twi shows her that, saying "I can't let you win even if we fight forever--your revenge means we all end up enslaved or dead." And Starlight, facing the truth of that, relents.
• Timeforks can reunite: theme of Jo Walton's strange book All My Children, in which an old woman has memory trouble--but half of it's because she has two incompatible pasts! Two sets of kids visit--from different timeforks that both lead her to the same hospital ward at the end of two long, fascinating lives.
• Feverish speed-up to a singularity: Geoffrey West's Scale, a study of size--in animals, companies, cities, societies. He argues the pace of innovation needed to stay ahead of growth-problems isn't sustainable longterm--individually manageable shortages & problems mount faster than our society can handle. But capitalism's hardwired for growth. So what to do, how to stabilize?
• Zeno's Paradox: Zeno, 2500 years ago, argued: "shoot an arrow at a target. It has to go halfway first, then half the remaining way, then half of that, then... it's an infinite regress! The arrow never hits the target--always crossing the first half, it can't reach the second. Yet the arrow strikes! So our notion of time, space or infinity must be defective." Are you worried? I doubt it. Still, in this dream, it was pretty rough living through an accelerating series near the end of the arrow's flight! Turbulence...
• Four years: the American presidential election cycle! Those two- and six-year spans confirm my suspicions--Congressional terms are two years, Senatorial terms six. That unicorn was healing a political rupture!
• ACTION: hang on tight. Looks like the run-up to the 2020 election, already rough, will get even rougher. We can get through the crisis point--with some bruises. And a little help from our horny friends, or guardian angels, or gods, or whoever you pray to. Pray a lot. We'll need it.

This dream brought to you by the Unicorn Temporal Stabilization Board

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