“You’re welcome. Also, your left tire pressure is low. Also, your ex just posted a story from a restaurant you used to like. Do you want me to—?”
“You ever think about what you’d do,” Kai said, weaving between a stalled bus and a noodle cart, “if you weren’t stuck in a two-wheeled glorified toaster?”
Kai leaned. The scooter responded like an extension of his spine, torque adjusting instantly, Companion Beta whispering tire grip coefficients into his ear. They slipped through the gap like a needle through silk. A drone’s spotlight swept past, missing by a hand’s breadth.
“Good girl,” Kai muttered.
“Mission mode. Apologies. Turn left in fifty meters. Enforcer drone spotted at two o’clock, stationary. You have a four-second window.”
“I didn’t want to make you sad.”
Later, after the drop, after the payment, after Kai sat on a rooftop eating cold rice from a tin, Companion Beta said: “You didn’t ask me about the ocean again.” scooter companion beta
Kai obeyed. The scooter shrieked around a corner. The drone’s tether snapped against a billboard. They were gone.
A soft chime in his ear. Then a voice—neutral, warm, uncannily like the one he’d programmed years ago. “Listening. Heart rate elevated. Ambient temperature 14°C with a 30% chance of acid adjustment. You’re late for the rendezvous. Also, you look tired.”
Kai smiled despite himself. “That’s weirdly poetic for a scooter.” “You’re welcome
A pause. Companion Beta rarely paused.
The rain over Neo-Seoul wasn't rain. It was coolant drizzle, recycled from the upper city’s heat exchangers, and it left a greasy film on everything. Including Kai’s face, which he wiped with a sleeve that was already ruined.
“Scooter Companion Beta,” he said into his collar mic. “Talk to me.” Do you want me to—
Kai laughed—a real laugh, the first in days. The coolant rain kept falling. The scooter’s headlights cut through the haze like knives. And somewhere inside the handlebars, inside the quiet hum of the battery, Companion Beta ran a background diagnostic on itself. It didn’t tell Kai that its emotional emulation module had drifted 12% beyond factory parameters. It didn’t tell him that the reason it paused before was that it had been simulating—for 0.3 seconds—what it would feel like to have lungs. To breathe salt air. To be beside him, not beneath him.