Companion Cube/Literature

Examples of Companion Cubes in Literature include:

Discworld

Another example, and probably one of the weirdest ones. Hex the calculating machine has a Teddy Bear after the events in Hogfather. Any attempts to remove the teddy bear results in Hex refusing to work.
- Which leads to the wizards saying that one of the requirements for Hex to work is that it is FTB Enabled, which stands for Fluffy Teddy Bear.

"I don't actually think," Ponder Stibbons said gloomily, "that I want to tell the Archchancellor that this machine stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just don't think I want to live in that kind of world."
"Er, you could always, you know, sort of say it needs to work with the FTB enabled."

Any time the question of why Ankh-Morpork doesn't have a king anymore comes up, it's likely that a past monarch's habit of appointing trees, flowerpots, and decapitated bodies as Privy Councilors will be cited as a reason.
Of the various troll street gangs from which Brick (from Thud!) has been excluded, the most abysmally stupid is Tenth Egg Street's Can't-Think-Of-A-Name gang. Allegedly, they consider a lump of concrete on a piece of string to be a gang member.

Other works

The Thing in The Bromeliad Trilogy. It reveals itself early in the first book to in fact be a sentient supercomputer, but the nomes had it for centuries before that.
Mason & Dixon has a scene in which a pair of clocks have a conversation, although it could just be the narrator (who is a weirdo) speculating on what they would be saying. Somewhat more notably, there is Robert Jenkins' Ear, which, although severed and pickled in a jar, is still alive and has magical powers derived from its enormous historical significance. Did I mention that Thomas Pynchon wrote this book?
In the Norwegian children's series Knerten by Anne Cath Westly, one of the main characters is a stick that looks like a human. The other main character, a little boy, treats him like his best friend and has apparently not realised that he's inanimate. Sort of like Calvin and Hobbes, although this one is older.
The Velveteen Rabbit. Subverted in that the eponymous rabbit becomes real at the end of the story.
The very first Winnie-the-Pooh story makes it quite evident that Edward Bear (aka Pooh) and all of his friends are actually Christopher Robin's stuffed animals. (Entirely justified since A.A. Milne invented the stories for his son, who had a teddy bear named Winnie, who was—incidentally—named after a real (female) bear at the zoo.)
By the Light of the Moon by Dean Koontz has Jilly and her potted plant, Fred. Fred is a stalwart, if silent, companion on whom Jilly practices her stand-up comedy routines.
In Virtual Mode by Piers Anthony, Colene has a stuffed horse from her childhood named Maresy Doats, named after a misheard song lyric.
Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls by Jane Lindskold has an interesting twist—inanimate objects constantly talk telepathically to the autistic main character, Sarah. And no, she's not imagining it: they sometimes tell her useful things, like the combinations to locks and safes, or the location of hidden items.
- That's the plot to a very strange mainstream novel called Victoria at Nine, which also has a Cheerful Child who is wise beyond her years along with a subversion of Growing Up Sucks.
As mentioned in the main article, this happens to starships a lot, often to the point where the ship itself is a main character (sometimes literally). Larry Niven invokes this trope a lot, such as with the battlecrusier INSS MacArthur in The Mote in God's Eye. A non-Speculative Fiction example would be the eponymous submarine in The Hunt for Red October, arguably the main character.
In Etgar Keret's short story Breaking the Pig, a boy becomes emotionally attached to his piggy-bank. When the bank gets full, he "sets it free" in the field so he won't have to break it.
Warrior Cats: Jayfeather and his stick. To the point where he always looks for the stick when he needs answers, and was horrified when he almost lost it in the lake. Feeling it also seems to calm him down (Is anyone thinking what I'm thinking?). JayxStick is also a very popular Cargo Ship within the fandom.
- The authors took notice of the Cargo Ship and killed it dead: the stick is broken in The Fourth Apprentice, by Jayfeather himself.
In the Star Wars anthology Tales From Jabba's Palace, Dumb Muscle Gartogg hauls around and talks to the dead bodies of the cook's assistant and a B'Omarr monk after stumbling onto the mystery of their murder and being tasked with solving it. Even though he did solve it eventually, he kept hauling the bodies everywhere he went because he'd gotten attached to them; they were the only people who didn't seem to mind his company.
Anne McCaffrey's book The Rowan has the title character treating her Pukha this way. The Pukha is essentially a child monitor and stuffed toy in one, but Rowan has one-sided conversations with it, even as she's clearly aware that it's an inanimate object.

"You'd scorch your fur and blow your circuits!"

In the original novel A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sara gets a doll named Emily from her father. Sara conceives of Emily as a listening companion, even a protective good witch, who moves around and does things when no one's looking. In the original novel, Sara's father dies in India, and Sara's attachment to Emily becomes one of her few escapes from her horrible situation. Until she breaks down and screams at it "You're just a doll!" and slaps it out of its chair. Later movie adaptations cut that scene out allowing Emily to be an expression of Sarah's imagination throughout.
- The girl in Enid Bagnold's National Velvet wants to own a stableful of horses, so she has a boxful of cutouts from magazines. She pastes them to heavy cardboard, makes saddles and bridles for them out of embroidery thread, and "rides" them on back country roads, then carefully rubs them down and puts them away. They all have names and histories.
In Robert A. Heinlein's Juvenile novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel, the main character names his eponymous suit "Oscar" and has conversations with it -- facilitated by a radio circuit he rigged to provide Answering Echoes every time he transmitted something. In one particular case, it even gives him a pep talk as he lays dying on the surface of Pluto. Note that though it's never mentioned outright, there's no indication that he actually believes he's talking to his suit, and he regards the Pluto incident as something of a hallucination.
Mercy Thompson is shadowed by an ancient magical walking stick whose initial purpose was to keep sheep healthy and ensure that all expectant sheep produced twins. Having developed a will of its own it tends to vanish and appear in places important to Mercy such as her home, office, car, and even in her hand when she really needs to hit something.
Older Than Radio: A Tale of Two Cities: A somber example Played for Drama: The shoemaker's bench and tools are this for Doctor Mannete, having being incarcerated alone by the Evremondes for 18 years, he begged for something to do, when he received it, he was so grateful he form an attachment with him. Years later, Mannete’s daughter Lucy marries Darnay who is an Evremond and the doctor feels the compulsion to work with the shoemaker’s bench. When Mr. Lorry talks about destroying it, Mannete refers to him as a friend but it accedes. And in the last chapters of the books, Manettes will ask for his friend again when he crosses the Despair Event Horizon. When Lorry and Miss Prost destroy the shoemakers’s bench, they also treat him like something alive:

On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went into his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker's bench to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder -- for which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The burning of the body (previously reduced to pieces convenient for the purpose) was commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools, shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.

The Doberman Hand Puppet in The Pale King, which is eventually revealed to belong to Dr. Lehrl.

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