Fresh
They 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.
Bloat
The 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.
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We 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.
Decay
The 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.