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"Beyond a thousand years from now humans are not quite recognizably human, and I have trouble finding characters."
- Larry Niven

Engineless Automobile Hover  
  No engine, no steering wheel, yet it runs.  

...she motioned me to follow her to where stood a vehicle not unlike an automobile. That is, it had a body and four wheels, seats for several people, and a steering gear. But here the resemblance to a motorcar ceased. There was no place for an engine!

The front came up in a sheer curve, like the prow of an ancient galley, extending as a roof over the length of the car. The wheels had perfectly flat exterior rims uncushioned with rubber or any other kind of tires. On those wheels, setting out from the hubs and coming level with that portion of the wheel-rims touching the floor, were large replicas of the same flat devices that adorned the feet of the woman 'who walked on air. Still obeying my guide, and not without an Inward feeling of trepidation, I climbed into this strange automobile, and we were away.

The vehicle ran across the floor and took off from the farthest edge of it, not onto a road or runway, but into space. For a moment I was guilty of clutching at my companion’s arm, so startled was I. Then I saw that we were not falling but running as if down hill. The action wasn’t that of an airplane gliding; it was that of an automobile rolling over an incredibly smooth road. There was a faint hissing sound, the slightest vibration of the seat beneath me; otherwise I could detect no indication of any motor. Set into the prow-like front of the car was a windshield, but even casual inspection showed it to be made of a peculiar glass. In fact I wasn’t at all sure that it was glass as we know it. The Instruments set in the face of a metal strip below the windshield were utterly strange to me.

But it was not chiefly the vehicle nor its manipulation that claimed my attention. For in a few minutes we were in the city itself and rolling along about twenty feet above the ground. Looking downward I could see no roads, no pavement such as we have ribboning our cities. What I had taken from a distance to be vast droves of birds now proved to be people and motor-cars using various levels of the air for their pathways.

Technovelgy from An Adventure in Time, by Francis Flagg.
Published by Science Wonder Stories in 1930
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