Report on the Five Hundred and Seventeen Missing Shopping Carts

It began at the supermarket named "Wanjiafu"—though, of course, it might have lain dormant long before, only revealing its true nature during this closing sale. Official records show that during the final stages of the asset inventory, the accountant, a cautious man named Wang who wore reading glasses, checked three times before reporting, with trembling hands: five hundred and seventeen shopping carts had vanished without a trace. Not damaged or abandoned in corners, but completely, inexplicably gone.

Initially, people tended to explain this bizarre number with common sense. Theft? Who would steal such cumbersome and seemingly useless metal baskets, and five hundred and seventeen of them at that? Retaliatory vandalism by former employees? Even the most radical saboteur would likely struggle to organize such a large-scale, silent operation. Moreover, there were no signs of forced entry around the supermarket, and the surveillance cameras—those tireless electronic eyes documenting the landscape of consumption—happened to be malfunctioning during those specific days, stuck in some kind of loop, leaving only footage of an empty parking lot and the static shadows of shelves.

The police intervened, but their report resembled a half-drawn maze map. They questioned owners of nearby scrap yards, who swore they had never seen such a large influx of shopping carts. They checked records of all possible transport vehicles, finding nothing. Officer Zhang, the pragmatic, somewhat dull middle-aged man in charge of the case, admitted沮丧ly in an internal meeting that the case exceeded the scope of theft, vandalism, or even a collective prank. It felt more like... an evaporation. A localized collapse of the basic rules of the physical world.

I, a humble employee at the municipal archives responsible for filing away documents forgotten by time, stumbled upon this dossier, numbered "City-XF-2024-037". At first, it seemed no different from countless other reports on subtle changes in the urban fabric, until I noticed the addendum by Accountant Wang—those few lines scribbled in ballpoint pen at the end of the report, almost illegible: "They don't seem to have been taken, but rather... left on their own accord."

This sentence struck me like a stone dropped into a stagnant pond, creating strange ripples in my mind. Left on their own accord? Shopping carts, those metal contraptions carrying our fleeting desires, blindly pushed through the supermarket maze—possessing will? The idea was so absurd it was almost poetic. I became engrossed in this mystery, searching through the vast ocean of archives for similar anomalous events.

I found some clues. Decades ago, a library reported the loss of several hundred specialized books on topology and non-Euclidean geometry, also vanished without a trace. Earlier still, all the benches in a park disappeared overnight, leaving only neat imprints on the ground. These incidents were scattered across different times and places, labeled as "unsolved mysteries" or "statistical errors," never connected. Until the Wanjiafu shopping carts.

I began to wander the city, my gaze no longer following pedestrians, but fixated on the solitary shopping carts scattered on street corners and in alleyways. Abandoned near bus stops, stuck in flowerbeds, or resting quietly in the depths of some alley, like silent question marks. I noticed their wheels, the worn rubber and metal, seemed always to point in a specific, elusive direction.

One late night, I followed a shopping cart pushed out from under an apartment building. A drunkard pushed it to an intersection and abandoned it there. I watched from the shadows. At first, it remained motionless. But around three in the morning, when the city sank into its deepest silence, I swear I saw the cart move slightly, almost imperceptibly. Not by wind, nor ground incline, but by a kind of... internal impulse. It adjusted its angle slightly, as if calibrating an invisible compass. Then, it began to roll slowly, following a route that was not the shortest, but was strangely precise, disappearing into the shadows of the next street corner.

I tailed it, and later, several other carts exhibiting similar 'autonomy'. They seemed drawn by some silent summons, converging from all corners of the city. Their paths were not straight but winding, circling, as if drawing a vast rune incomprehensible to mortals.

Finally, in an abandoned railway switching yard, I saw the scene. Over five hundred shopping carts—I couldn't count precisely, but the number undoubtedly matched the figure missing from Wanjiafu, perhaps even more, as if it had absorbed all the stray carts of the city—were not piled up, but arranged with astonishing geometric precision. They formed a massive, inwardly rotating spiral. The center of the spiral was not empty, but a deep point of darkness that seemed to devour light, a darkness less physical and more like a metaphysical void.

The shopping carts stood still, their metal frames gleaming coldly under the bleak moonlight. They were no longer tools for carrying goods, but participants in some mysterious ritual, or components of a vast, silent mechanical entity. I felt dizzy, as if I had glimpsed another set of laws operating beneath the logic of the city—cold, alien laws concerning objects, space, and existence itself.

Were these carts tired of endlessly circulating in the labyrinth of consumerism? Were they seeking some form of liberation, a return to the ultimate order of pure geometric form? Or were they simply the materialization of the city's collective unconscious, the metal ghosts of suppressed desires, forgotten paths, and individuality worn smooth by standardized life?

I retreated quietly, leaving the place behind. I didn't call the police, nor did I include my findings in any official report. I knew that even if I spoke, it would be dismissed as the ravings of a madman. That dossier, "City-XF-2024-037," was eventually sealed away with other unsolved cases in the deepest corner of the archives, waiting to be completely forgotten, or rediscovered by another soul who stumbles upon it by chance, like me.

Now, when I walk the city streets, I still see the scattered shopping carts. But I look at them differently. They are no longer ordinary objects, but fragments of the labyrinth, messengers of that vast, silent spiral. Sometimes, I stop and look at the caked mud and worn marks on their wheels, trying to decipher their silent language, trying to understand where they are ultimately heading. Perhaps their destination is not a physical place, but a symbolic realm, a Borges-esque library of emptiness, order, and infinite cycles, where all shopping carts will eventually reside, composing an encyclopedia of our era, written in metal and void. And those five hundred and seventeen were merely the first readers to arrive, or perhaps, the first words to be written.