“There’s only one scooter left in the entire city,” the mechanic said matter-of-factly, wiping his greasy hands on an equally greasy rag. His small workshop was cluttered with dismantled hover-vehicles and obsolete parts.
I stared at him in disbelief. “That’s impossible. What happened to all the others?”
He shrugged, gesturing toward the window. Outside, streams of people floated by, their bodies suspended in mid-air by invisible anti-gravity fields. “Progress happened. Nobody needs wheels anymore when you can float.”
The last functioning scooter sat in the corner, its scratched red paint gleaming dully under the fluorescent lights. It looked absurdly primitive among the sophisticated machinery surrounding it.
“I’ll take it,” I said without hesitation.
The mechanic raised an eyebrow. “You understand this is considered a historical artifact now? The Ministry of Transportation has been trying to acquire it for their museum.”
“How much?”
“It’s not about the money.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Yesterday, I woke up and found myself transforming into a floating orb of light. It lasted for three hours before I returned to normal. The day before, my neighbor became a holographic projection of his former self.”
I felt a chill run down my spine. Similar incidents had been reported across the city - people spontaneously mutating into various states of matter, their physical forms becoming increasingly unstable as technology advanced.
“The scooter…” I began.
“Is the last piece of pure mechanical engineering in this city,” he finished. “No AI, no quantum computing, no consciousness transfer protocols. Just metal, rubber, and honest physics.”
That evening, I rode the scooter through the eerily quiet streets. Above me, citizens floated by like luminous jellyfish, their bodies occasionally glitching and fragmenting into pixels before reassembling. Some had already evolved beyond physical form entirely, existing as pure data streams in the city’s network.
A woman materialized beside me, her form flickering between solid and transparent. “How peculiar,” she mused, studying my vehicle. “You choose to remain bound by gravity?”
“I choose to remain human,” I replied.
She laughed, her voice distorting into digital static. “Human? What does that even mean anymore?”
Before I could answer, she dissolved into a shower of light particles that merged with the city’s glowing infrastructure.
The next morning, I found myself unable to touch the scooter. My hands passed right through it, as if I were becoming a ghost. Panic seized me as I realized what was happening - the city’s relentless march toward technological transcendence was claiming another victim.
The mechanic’s words echoed in my mind: “The last piece of pure mechanical engineering.”
As my body began to lose its physical form, I understood the truth. The scooter wasn’t insufficient or obsolete - we were. In our rush to evolve beyond our physical limitations, we had lost touch with the simple beauty of being bound by the laws of nature.
The last scooter remained solid and real, a testament to what we once were, while we dissolved into the digital ether, becoming everything and nothing at once.