The bunker was three hundred feet below the surface, accessible only through a series of abandoned subway tunnels that most people had forgotten existed. Here, in this concrete sanctuary, Marcus tended to humanity's greatest treasure: ten thousand physical books.
In the world above, everything was digital. Books, as physical objects, had been outlawed twenty years ago as wasteful and inefficient. But Marcus remembered the feel of pages, the smell of ink and paper, the weight of a story held in your hands.
He wasn't alone in his vigil. Every week, people would find their way to him—readers who remembered, or young people curious about the forbidden artifacts their grandparents spoke of in whispers. Marcus would let them in, one at a time, and watch their faces light up as they held a real book for the first time.
One day, a young woman named Iris discovered the library. She had never seen a physical book before, but her grandmother had told her stories about them before she died. As Iris opened her first book—a worn copy of poetry—tears streamed down her face.
'This is what we've lost,' she whispered. 'This is what we need to remember.'
Marcus smiled. As long as there were people like Iris, the last library would never truly be the last. It would be the first of many to come.