In the fleshDownload PDF FUTURES29 April 2026Cyberspace can’t fulfil every need.ByJasmin Kirkbride0Jasmin KirkbrideJasmin Kirkbride is a writer and academic. Her work includes The Forest on the Edge of Time (Tor, 2026). She lectures in creative writing and digital technologies at the University of East Anglia.View author publicationsSearch author on: PubMed Google ScholarIllustration: JaceyGetting pulled meatside is always disgusting, but it’s worse during an emergency shutdown. In the verses, my sleek form adapts seamlessly to my surroundings: looks hot, smells great, tastes delicious. This sack of flesh is all dusting, wrinkling, sagging, spotting, fermenting, fugging meatness. I reek like my Faecal Management System has malfunctioned, my stomach acid churning and breath sour as if I haven’t eaten in days. Worst are the throbbing heartbeat and spiralling thoughts, sudden and unwelcome after the dopamine funscape of cyberspace. My skin aches. I need quenching.My hand slaps the alarm, shutting off its whine. I sit up, bones heavy in my atrophied muscles, and my FMS seal pops away while my feeding tube and urinary catheter rub inside my dehydrated body. Surely, this is painful even for an emergency shutdown. I let my modesty sheet slide away and dangle my legs off the chair, waiting for my dizziness to subside. It doesn’t quite.“Quencher!” I yell. The house is silent. My body twitches with hunger. Who’s the Quencher this shift? A regular, but which one? “Isadora? Lucille?”I register my sucked-dry nutrient bag and the burst drainage sack whose contents puddle the floor. No wonder my chair went into shutdown: a Quencher clearly hasn’t been round in weeks. Malingerers. I’ll have to sort this out myself. I tug the impossibly long nasogastric feeding tube through my nostril, and extract my burning catheter, dribbling dark urine on my hands.Read more science fiction from Nature Futures“Hello?” I try again. My skin prickles as I pull on my meatside clothes and open the verseroom door. It takes only a minute to confirm that I really am alone in my hyper-minimalist house. I rub stiff fingers against my papery face. I never planned to leave again. Outside are stinging insects, unkempt gardens, noise and heat that can’t be filtered. But this idiot body tingles, forcing me into the flip-flops that some Quencher left by the door, then out onto the street.I squint against the sunlight, brighter and whiter than my cyberspace settings, and shuffle down the road on disobedient legs. Aside from cicada buzz, it’s a ghost town. Shortly before I went verside full time, the federal government mandated that VRulents should live in designated neighbourhoods to keep fleshburbs alive, and the state government realized they could get away with minimal upkeep because, essentially, we don’t live here. As a result, VRulent neighbourhoods are always quiet: there’s no trash for wild animals to eat, no shops or restaurants for meatheads to visit, nothing worth stealing except maybe our bodies. Even so, they’re not this quiet. There’s usually at least one Quencher around.The neighbourhood stretches for blocks, one clapboard bungalow after another. It’s long way to walk on starving feet, so I start trying door-handles. I’m surprised at the number that give way under my shaking fingers, but I find only more of my kin, hooked into the verses and too serene to disturb. Still no Quencher in sight, and I’m not the only VRulent whose kit’s giving out from lack of service.One house contains a VRulent family: Mum, Dad, pre-teen sister, toddler brother and, in a large glass pod, a growing fetus. Its umbilical cord runs from under Mum’s sheet, through a valve into the tank. The baby kicks, drumming dully on the womb-shaped pod, its pink skin turning yellow-white against the glass. The pod contains devices that mimic Mum’s heartbeat and body temperature. This must be the latest QuenchTon trial in action, using fetuses in artificial utero to develop touch — our first sense and the hardest to replace in VR. This fetus could be the first human who’ll live their entire life in the verses, never needing to set foot into meatspace. I wonder what the verses look like through its eyes, born before it’s born.Looking around, the whole family’s hooked up to QuenchTon tech. Their in-verse kickbacks for volunteering for these first human trials must be incredible — as they should be. Humanity needs this. I’ve heard rumours of protests about it, concerns about raising children with biochemical imbalances, but it’s so short-sighted. We can’t all live meatside any more, not in this heat.The Mum’s QuenchTon device animates, warm plasti-skin hands infused with hormones stroking her face, neck and arms. At a pheromonal, molecular level, her body should be responding, and with luck her skin hunger will be getting quenched without it impacting her VR experience. My chest aches, but I can’t hook myself up to these machines. Even if I could get them to work on me, I’d be interfering with crucial experiments.After that, I stop breaking in, and just keep walking until I hit a fleshburb, where a man is mowing his front lawn. His military arm tattoos have faded to blue, and his skin is tough with suntan and worry. He stops when he sees me, leaning on the mower handle.“You one of those tech addicts?” he asks.“A VRulent,” I reply, voice creaking with lack of use.“Same thing.”doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01073-y The memory dealer of Old Jeddah by Addidi Youness Waiting for them by Marissa Lingen New year, old me by Robert Blasiak Ozymandias undead by Bryce Saputo Homelessness of the heart by Tomias Keno Immolation by Lucy Zhang False hope by Hall Jameson Sock. Something. 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