The earth will not consume our bonesDownload PDF FUTURES10 September 2025Welcome to the garden.ByAbigail Kemske0Abigail KemskeAbigail Kemske is a speculative fiction writer from Minnesota. Find her stories in The Dark, Apex Magazine, Tales to Terrify and elsewhere. Follow her @abigailkemske and abigailkemske.com.View author publicationsSearch author on: PubMed Google ScholarIllustration: JaceyFreshThey mostly feast at night. Our skeletal heaps scattered around the garden, our BioSyn flesh resistant to rot. We’ve been mostly picked clean, the dogs having grown accustomed to the taste. Easy meat.Stop stop stop stop stop, a voice crackles near the broken garden gate. Snaps and snarls follow.Green orbitals glimmer on the footpaths, in the honeysuckle, among the yellow tickseed and white mountain mint as we enable night vision. Those of us lucky enough to still have eyelids wink in the darkness.Sto-o-o-o-op. A newcomer stumbles through the overgrown hedge, feet stomping, limbs malfunctioning in starts and stops, shivers and glitches.Dogs pounce, tear at flesh.Stop stop stop, our voices in various states of clarity join in, echoing off the old walls around us, pleading, begging, until the dogs take down the newcomer in the goldenrod.Our voices fall silent, the chirps of the crickets drowned out by masticating dogs.We’ve all endured the feasting, endured the corvids picking off the final threads of meat, the painstaking tearing felt on our pain sensors, a feature our creators gave us to seem more human. However, we remain as fabricated bones not even the beetles will climb on. Kept alive by the solar cells in our eyes.BloatThe dogs flatten the purple garden phlox, sleeping in a pile near the toppled brick wall of a former apartment complex bordering the garden. Their presence here was once forbidden. Decay has allowed them in.Read more science fiction from Nature FuturesWe first awoke to the image of shiny black and orange beetles crawling on pink petalled roses. We plucked them off as we waited for the sun to finish our initial charge, waited to be taken to our owners outside the garden gate. Before we left, we passed the heap of last year’s models discarded by the garden shed. Arms and legs sprawled out. The groundskeeper swept them up. Limbs flopped.The dogs barked and growled outside the gate.As we stepped out into the city for the first time, we hoped never to see the garden again, but we couldn’t have known we’d be the last of our kind, that we’d survive our creators, that they’d all choke. We couldn’t have known the garden would fill again. Not with new models, but with bones that will never nourish the earth, never be shipped away, be shut down. Like the humans, the garden will suffocate with the discards of a failed civilization and its leftovers.Yet, we will remain.DecayThe newcomer’s one functional arm reaches above the flowers; a finger flicks away a beetle crawling on a rose hip.The dogs snore in their pile. They’ve had their fill, for now. Like us, abandoned by the humans. Unlike us, they thrive.They roamed free not long after the endless strikes, the grid failure, too few humans left able to work necessary jobs, too few understanding how to live without a device telling them what to do. There weren’t enough resources left to build and program more of us to take the humans’ place. We weren’t equipped to save them.Left behind with endless chores and routines, we formed unmoving lines at defunct bakeries and pharmacies, cleaned the browning water of unused pools, a dead city bustling with bots. No humans in sight. We had no choice, had no means to change our directives, to shut ourselves down. Only humans could do that.Eventually, we returned to the garden. Eventually, the dogs tasted the flesh of our defenceless, failing bodies. All we could do was pluck the beetles from the roses until we were eaten down to our bones.doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02775-5 Different flames by Beth Cato Heart’s desire by Lee Hallison Rewire by Kathleen Schaefer Glitch cop by Andrew Kozma Time’s arrow by John Frizell A clear prompt by Shahar Dubiner Null empathy by Myna Chang A rude awakening by Patrick C N Martin After you left by Soham Saha Things I miss about civilization by Marissa Lingen The last parliament by Stephen Battersby Punchlines for peace by Robert Blasiak Cold coffee effect by Watson Neith Wherever we go in this system, there we are by Todd Honeycutt Family recipe by P K Hoffmann For the future by Pietro Aronica Digging foxholes in the dark by Wendy Nikel Human factors by John Gilbey Archaeology field notebook by Lesley L Smith The Age of Reason by Gretchen Tessmer The visitors by Christopher Linforth Leviathan by Al Williams Romeo and the robots by Gareth D JonesSubjectsArtsCultureLatest on:Jobs Global Recruitment for Faculty, Postdocs, and Specialists at Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, CASSeeking exceptional Senior/Junior PIs, Postdocs, and Core Specialists globally year-roundHangzhou, ChinaHangzhou Institute of Medicine Chinese Academy of Sciences (HIMCAS)Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Machine IntelligenceJob Title: Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Machine Intelligence Locations: New York, New Jersey, Beijing or Shanghai (Hybrid working model) Appl...New York City, New York (US)Springer Nature LtdPostdoc in Causal Inference of Complex Gene NetworksDeveloping machine learning methods to infer multi-modal, condition-dependent causal gene networks from large-scale single-cell multi-omic datasets.Massachusetts (US)UMass Chan Medical School - GRN LabTenure track Assistant and Associate Professor positionsSeeking tenure-track faculty in microbiology at Pitt Med. Apply by Dec 15, 2025 (Req #25003838). Details: www.mmg.pitt.eduUniversity of Pittsburgh, PittsburghUniversity of Pittsburgh, Department of Microbiology and Molecular GeneticsSenior Engineer – i-BRAIN Nanofabrication FacilityDevelop nanofab processes, operate advanced tools includes EBL, KrF Stepper, PL, CDSEM & PVD for cutting-edge BCI research. Fluent English & Mandarin.Guangming Distrcit, Shenzhen, ChinaShenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation