The Last of the Firefighters is a near-future tale that follows Johnny Stasso, a firefighter with the Boulder Fire-Rescue Department, through four decades of unprecedented technological change. The book’s website can be found at TheLastoftheFirefighters.com. I didn’t write it to predict the future, although some readers have taken it that way. I wrote it because I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would mean for all of us if the jobs we associate most deeply with courage, risk, and purpose suddenly vanished. Not through some Hollywood apocalypse, not by alien invasion or nuclear war, but simply because we got better at building machines. Machines that don’t breathe smoke. Don’t feel pain. Don’t hesitate at the threshold of a burning building. Johnny, the protagonist in the story, gains personal satisfaction from his job, but also suffers the enduring traumas experienced by most first responders. As technology advances, he witnesses and struggles with the gradual and disheartening transformation of his beloved profession. From the introduction of advanced robotics, like PyroBots and self-driving fire trucks, to the elimination of water in firefighting, Johnny grapples with the changing nature of heroism and his own identity. While his profession is transforming, Johnny is also navigating personal challenges, including a complex relationship with his wife, Nina, an AI scientist. The spark for the novel came years ago during a conversation about AI and automation. Someone, probably a well-meaning futurist, said that firefighting would be one of the last jobs to go. It was too physical, too unpredictable, too human. That stuck with me because it felt wrong. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the end of firefighting as we know it was going to occur alongside of a cascade of other careers facing the same fate. So, I wrote a book about what happens to the heroes when the world no longer asks for them. About what it means to carry purpose through obsolescence. And about what happens to communities, especially stubborn, proud, bruised communities, when the old ways finally fail and something new and unrecognizable takes their place. This story centers around Johnny, the ‘last of the firefighters,’ but really it is about everyone in Johnny’s world. Nina, the AI pioneer who builds robots and tries to maintain control over a revolution that long ago transcended her original mission of creating a safer workplace. Sven, the old friend and fallen comrade whose loyalty binds him to a cause he barely cares about anymore. Tooie, the robot designed to follow orders but who learns, somehow, to carry out his mission even after his creators stop directing him. I wrote this book not just to explore the external changes — the rise of PyroBots, the collapse of traditional jobs, the substitution of intelligent machines for human labor — but to explore the internal reckoning that comes with living through a transformation of this magnitude. What does it feel like to be the last of your kind? What happens when the very instincts that once made you indispensable are now called liabilities? What do you do when no one needs you anymore, but you still define yourself by your mission? In a way, I think of The Last of the Firefighters as a ghost story. Not of spirits or hauntings, but of people outliving their purpose and trying to make peace with that. Johnny doesn’t just fight fires; he fights the slow, creeping erosion of dignity. Nina doesn’t just build AI; she builds a mirror of herself, only to find the reflected image doesn’t look like her at all. At the time I began drafting The Last of the Firefighters, over ten years ago, the idea of AI replacing complex human labor was still a cocktail-party provocation. Now it’s dinner-table reality. Back then, we argued about whether robots could write or reason. Today, we are asking if they have morals and ethics. Should they run courtrooms, design policy, fight wars, or comfort the dying? But The Last of the Firefighters isn’t a policy brief or a warning. It’s a eulogy and a love letter. It’s a story about grief, because that’s what change always is, even when it’s for the better. And it’s a story about adaptation, not just the technological kind, but the emotional, generational, cultural kind that asks people to soften in the face of forces they can’t control. I didn’t want to write a book where the humans lose and the machines win. That’s not how I see it. I think we’re already tangled up together, inseparably. I think our machines are already extensions of our hopes, our insecurities, our contradictions. The line between us and them isn’t as clean as the old sci-fi would have it. It’s smeared with fingerprints, with regrets, with longing. You’ll notice that Johnny is not a technophobe. He’s not raging against the dying of the analog light. He’s a man who wanted to matter, and who kept trying to matter, even when the systems around him said he didn’t. And Nina isn’t a mad scientist. She’s a woman who wanted to protect people, who believed that empathy could be engineered. She wanted Tooie to be a bridge. She didn’t expect him to cross over. The epilogue, written from Nina’s perspective, is perhaps the quietest and most personal part of the book. It’s where the novel finally exhales. I wrote it with a sense of ache and grace. By then, in 2064, the world has changed. Johnny is gone, and Nina, brilliant, defiant, sits on her porch communing with machines that are now her friends and companions with a shared history. But they no longer need her to grow and survive. There’s no moral at the end of this story. No prescription. But there is an invitation: to sit with the characters. To listen to their confusion, their resilience, their absurd moments of humor and grace. To see, in their particular struggles, a reflection of the larger ones we’re all caught up in. When I talk to readers, they often ask me if Tooie is alive. If he has consciousness. If he’s a person. I think that’s the wrong question. The better question is: why do we need to know? What changes if he is conscious? What changes if he isn’t? The Last of the Firefighters doesn’t answer that question. But it doesn’t dodge it either. It asks you to feel your way through it. If you have read this book, I thank you for joining me in this story and ask you to please rate it and write a review. I hope you found something in it that surprises you, maybe unsettles you, maybe even comforts you. And if nothing else, I hope it reminds you that even in a world of artificial intelligence, there’s still a place for human courage. Especially the quiet kind. Thanks to Dr. Joe Ferguson, author of Age of Logos, for uploading the transcripts of our lengthy conversations to ChatGPT and coaxing it to generate the first draft of this article.