"Dawn of the Dinohybrids: A Tale of Transformation and Survival"

It started with a bang—a literal, window-rattling, body-throwing KABOOM that changed my life forever.

I suppose I should introduce myself before things get too prehistoric. My name’s Jesse Nolan. I was, up until last Thursday, just another undergrad intern at the Horowitz Institute of Paleogenetics and Applied Biotechnology. That’s a fancy way of saying: I scraped beakers and watched smarter people argue about extinct proteins.

Now? I’m a spinosaurus.

I mean, not right this second. If anyone’s monitoring this comm, rest assured, I’m typing with regular, lumpy human fingers. But if I let myself slip, focus on my heart rate and all the weird muscle memories that aren’t mine, I could become something that shouldn’t be alive.

Let me go back.

Dr. Pasternak, our PI, was always the mad scientist type, but last week’s “Ancestral Revival” trial felt normal. The team had finally sequenced a full sauropod genome—courtesy of fossilized medullary bone and some batshit AI error-correction. The whole lab was buzzing. Pasternak wanted to test “retroviral vectors on mammalian tissue.” We guinea-pig interns—me, Anton, and Julie—snuck in after hours, more for curiosity than ambition.

There was this egg-shaped pod, a “decontaminator” that was supposed to make sure none of the ancient spores we spatulated around the tissue culture would, well, kill us. Julie dared Anton to hop in.

“I bet you five bucks you’ll glow in the dark,” she teased.

I elbowed in, too, always the tag-along. Pasternak’s gene recipes meant nothing to me, but I loved the hum of the machines, the ozone, the sense we were on the edge of something big.

It only took ten seconds—the pod door hissed, white mist everywhere, then that brutal, thunderous blast. I remember impact, not pain. The world spun and pixelated. I blinked, tasted copper.

When I finally came around, Julie was yelling, “Anton! Jesse! GET OUT!”

My back felt like it was splitting open. I tried to get up, but my center of gravity was different—heavier. Longer. There were scales, and my mouth was full of teeth. The screams weren’t human.

I saw Julie become this raptorish shadow—dazzling blue feathers, slashing talons—and Anton, hulking, squat, a literal ankylosaurus. And me? My hands splayed into claws, my head jutted forward, the whole lab’s murky reflection showing a set of jaws longer than an arm and the wild sail of a spinosaurus rising jagged from my spine. I roared, overwhelmed, shaking with monstrous adrenaline, unable to stop.

Someone shrieked—was it me or Julie?—and sprinklers doused the carnage. Then I blacked out.

When the sirens wailed, we ran—staggered, half-lizard, half-confused grad kids, bleeding DNA we didn’t deserve. From that day forward, we were government property.

*

Let me tell you, nothing peels off the last shreds of normal life quite like waking up naked and half-reptile behind a Taco Bell dumpster with your two best friends in similar conditions, sirens and searchlights sweeping overhead.

Anton, always the pragmatic nerd, took charge. “We need supplies. Clothes. Food. And not to turn into dinosaurs every time we panic.”

I grunted, scales rippling and receding as I forced myself human again. That trick would take days to master. The hunger, though, never left. It gnawed at me, the craving for fish, for water, for the chase.

Julie could control her shifts best from the start; she could call up her raptor claws at will, little flickers of tail and feathers that disappeared when she laughed.

Ankylosaurus, as Anton discovered, basically meant ‘indestructible with irritable bowel syndrome.’ He tried to armor up whenever agents came sniffing—once flattening a black SUV by rolling onto it.

The government found us insanely fast. Hazmat teams, drones, helicopters. Facial recognition picked our faces off a thousand security cams. We ran, shifted, hid. Sometimes I caught my reflection in a car window and barely recognized the hungry, wary eyes looking back at me.

Beneath it all, the changes weren’t just on the outside. I started remembering things—sensations, urges, the world through a predator’s senses: the taste of blood, the warmth of muddy riverbanks, the metallic tang of the Cretaceous air looping through my snout. Sounds and images surged up, ancient and wild, so vivid I was sure I was losing my mind.

The three of us stuck together as we zigzagged across half the country, chased by men in tactical gear yelling, “DOWN! DO NOT TRANSFORM!” (Fat chance.) When cornered, Julie baffled pursuers with blinding speed, Anton bulldozed barricades, and I—Jesse-turned-spinosaurus—took care of any unfortunate vehicles that got too close to water.

Our fugitive life developed a rhythm. We camped near reservoirs—my aquatic cravings always dictating our route. Julie snuck food, usually eggs. Anton figured out how to use cryptocurrencies to buy burner phones and ticket fares. I became the muscle, carrying my friends across swamps.

We learned to shift faster, with less pain. It became almost fun, at night, to let go and play. We’d race under moonlight, dinosaurs in the alien world of highways and neon. Julie would leap over fences as a feathered meteor; Anton would stomp behind, plowing up earth; I would run, then swim, feeling the deep pulse of the spinosaurus in my heart—ancient, free, and fierce.

But always, always, there were the inevitable chases.

One night, pinned in a box canyon in Utah, black helicopters buzzing overhead, I almost surrendered. The government’s message was clear: We were too dangerous to live loose. When I thought the game was up, when spotlights burned and the echo of gunfire rang, I let it take over. I reared up, fifteen tons of primeval terror, and roared loud enough to shake the valley. The agents faltered. Anton flung a boulder. Julie snatched a keycard. We scrambled up the cliffs and vanished, legends in our own time.

Afterward, wrapped in a borrowed blanket, I stared at the stars and wondered if we’d ever be safe again.

“We could keep running forever,” Anton said.

“Or we could make a stand,” Julie replied, tail flicking.

I surprised myself. “Better to be monsters on our own terms than experiments in a cage.”

We checked our burner phones; another “sighting” had gone viral. Social media was on fire—there were memes of us, conspiracy threads, wild speculation. Sympathizers. People rooting for us.

So we ran, hunted, hid. Sometimes fought. Sometimes helped. Sometimes—I’d like to think—we inspired. I don’t know what the future holds, or if some agency will finally neutralize us.

But for now, the three of us live on the edge, half-human, half-dinosaur, rewriting survival for a world that never imagined monsters like us would be anything but extinct.

And let me tell you: extinction is highly overrated.

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.

AI Prompts