"Chronicles of the Thunderous Transformation"

It starts with a flash. That's the only way I can explain it—a silver, spiderwebbed lightning branching across the sky, crackling like blown speakers. We’re hiking in the badlands, me, Aaron, Kim, and Jazz. Normally we’d stick to the trails, but Aaron swore there were fresh fossil beds downstream. I should have argued harder.

I see the bolt race into the river. The world goes white. There’s a twisting pressure, like my bones are inflating, like my mind’s being poured into a different skull. The pain is tidal, searing—

Then the cold. Water everywhere, sludgy with silt. I open my eyes to a different horizon. My head is huge—the snout long and heavy, studded with conical teeth. I lurch up with four legs digging into mud, not two, my tail whipping behind me—thick, muscular, sweeping side to side with each breath.

My skin is a scaled armor, patterned with ochres and swampy greens. The weight on my back is a sail—a ridge of elongated spines, strung with tight membranes. I’m enormous. I’m alien. I am… a Spinosaurus, and not the Hollywood monster: my legs are stumpy, tips knuckling the mud, feet broad as canoe paddles. My arms—long, three-clawed—scrape the reeds. My nostrils perch atop my snout, perfectly placed to lurk just above the water.

The floodplain around me is different too: thicker ferns, heat steaming in layers, dragonflies sunning on broad leaves, the stink of alligators in the air. It’s as if some clock is running backward.

I spin, confusion pulsing in my new heart. Where are my friends? There: a feather-shrouded blur bolts from the bushes, high legged, claws slicing the air—Kim, I realize, a scythe-clawed raptor, color-shifting with panic. Beside her, a knobby-headed sauropod, maybe Jazz, eyes goggling on a giraffe’s neck.

Aaron charges in—he’s become something hulking and crested, a white-spotted theropod with jaws that snap at fish, and I know, instinctively, he’s a baryonyx. He looks desperate, furious. His voice, when it comes, is a guttural shriek—but I hear it as, “What happened?!"

I try to answer, but my sounds are thunder-throated hisses, more crocodilian than human. Slowly, piece by piece, we start to puzzle it out—each of us inside a new body, our minds warped but not erased, our speech distorted, but with some unspoken understanding mentalling between us, thoughts bobbing on an ancient current.

Being Spinosaurus is a revelation. The urge to swim grows stronger. My snout cuts the water; my tail propels me like a living oar. I dive, slicing between the willow roots, teeth snapping up gar fish by feel, taste and hunger perfectly matched for the prey.

Fear pulses from the others. Kim is quick and clever, using her killer claws to dig insects; Jazz swings her tail like a whip, flattening reeds into a nest; Aaron grumbles, always hungry. But the world hums with electricity—natural, alive, ancient and new. Is it the fossil beds, or the storm, or something alive in the ground itself that did this?

Days fold over us. Instincts grow louder: the need to hunt, to migrate, to survive. But flickers of humanity refuse to die. At dusk, we gather by the riverbank—dinosaurs, yabbering and bellowing jokes in the new language of tails and posture, hiding our terror.

I look at my reflection, a spined dragon in the muddy water, and miss my hands, my phone, my old smile. But there’s something exhilarating too: slicing through water, weightless and strong, part of a vanished ecosystem no dig ever could reveal.

We hunt. We flee from even bigger monsters. We learn to live in ancient skin, never sure if the storm will reverse or if we are now legends, cast adrift in the past. But we have each other. That, it turns out, is more essential than opposable thumbs.

And, as the night-whirrs fill the air, I arch my sail to the moon and roar a hymn for whoever might be listening—man or monster—proud to be the most beautiful, most dangerous Spinosaurus the world has ever known.

This story was generated by user kade with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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