Today: the hop-and-hurl locomotiers.

Imagine you stand in front of a thing. You would call it a vehicle – if you had to. It is there. It takes up space. Barely any. The shape tells you nothing. But something about it makes you wait.

One of them said: we start with the big family.

The Pleasurer of Slido exhaled. A touring spacer unfolded – seats for whoever travels together, room for the equipment that children apparently cannot travel without, space that didn't argue with the luggage. A family of six. A shared household of four adults and a dog. Three generations on a Sunday. Simply: of course, you fit.

I was still applauding when it happened again.

The touring spacer was gone. In its place: a pop-up ambulance. Not a resemblance of one – the real thing. Equipment flush against the walls. Light that knows what it's doing. A calm that has rehearsed itself. It doesn't wait in a depot. It lives on the street. When you need it, it's already there – because it never left. The neighbour two doors down. The flatmate who didn't come home.

Still the same thing. It had simply decided to be something else for a while.

"This combination," he said, "makes us proud."

I understood why. I was still catching up.

There are more shapes. They didn't show me all of them. I could tell by the way he smiled when I stopped asking.

It is never parked. It is never idle. The parking problem was not solved. It was made irrelevant.

Then it made itself small again. Politely, almost apologetically small. The space it left behind was almost nothing.

"What do you call them?" I asked.

"Pleasurers of Slido," he said. Plural. Always plural. They don't exist alone.

I looked around. There they were – a whole phalanx. Each one taking up almost nothing. A sliver of street. A breath of kerb. The space between two parked thoughts. Present, undemanding, ready.

Until they are needed. Then they become everything.

Not a fleet. Not a sequence. One thing, moving through its own possibilities.

"How many shapes does it have?" I asked.

He smiled. I already knew that smile.

The road has a smell. It always did – we just stopped noticing because the bad kind won.

Worthy Cargo avoids messing around with transport.

Every vehicle, every load, every container passes The Snout. I had expected sensors. Cables. A readout. The Snout looks like nothing in particular – which is how you know it is serious. Dogs have three hundred million olfactory receptors. Humans have six million. The Snout didn't split the difference. It went further than the dog.

It doesn't measure. It knows.

Exhaust that poisons slowly. Tyre residue that accumulates quietly. The plastic duck that squeaks once and lives forever in a landfill. The fast fashion that travelled ten thousand kilometres to be worn twice. Worthy Cargo doesn't argue with any of it. The Snout simply doesn't let it through.

The road becomes a curated space. Not every container from everywhere for everyone. Only what deserves the journey.

When the green truck glides past, people wave. Nobody steps aside. Nobody holds their breath.

"We smell it," she said. "That's all."

I kept waiting for the part where it gets complicated. It didn't. They just – do it. As if a street full of worthy cargo were the most obvious thing in the world. Which, apparently, it is.

They threw me in.

No instruction. No demonstration. Just: in.

Everyone was wearing The Cling. I couldn't see it at first – it wraps itself around the foot so naturally you think it's skin. Smart material that doesn't read your mind. Reads your mood. There is a difference.

The woman to my left was skulking. Long, low, unhurried – her feet barely leaving the ground. The man ahead was bouncing, loose at the knees, some private rhythm he had found and wasn't sharing. Two teenagers in the corner had invented something that had no name yet – part crawl, part leap, entirely theirs.

Nobody collided. Nobody adjusted. Nobody waited.

I felt The Cling tighten slightly around my foot. A suggestion, not a command. My body answered before I did.

I started to hop. Small at first. Then less small.

The group moved like a weather system – everyone going somewhere, nobody in anyone's way, the whole thing somehow coherent without ever being coordinated. Joy without choreography. Direction without destination.

"How does it know?" I asked afterwards.

"It doesn't know," she said. "It listens."

Someone asked how they came up with the name of the Gazellentiger. The tiger hunts. The gazelle appears to be the victim – until it isn't. It escapes with such grace that you forget it was ever in danger. They wanted both in one step. The hunger of the tiger. The elegance of the not-quite-caught.