"Evolution's Embrace"

It started with a metallic tang on my tongue. The last thing I remembered was my friend Leo yelling, something heavy thudding against the van’s sliding door. Then, all at once, the world dissolved into static and buzzing light.

When I came to, I was no longer myself.

The white glare of the lab ceiling hammered into my eyes. Restraints bit into my arms and legs. I tried to lift my head, but it wobbled like it was filled with syrup. Through the astringent haze came Leo’s voice—raw, panicked, bitten off by a gurgle.

“Alex—what’s—happening to us?”

There was no time to answer. Something volcanic surged through my bones. My right hand ballooned, skin splitting in a savage snarl as the fingers fused, merging into a thick, leathery paw tipped with sickle claws. I gaped in terror, tried to scream, only to cough up a mouthful of blood-tinged spit.

My tongue grew bulkier, the taste buds blurring. My teeth throbbed, sharpening, lengthening into daggers. I ducked my head reflexively—only, my neck creaked and stretched, vertebrae popping, muscles writhing under the surface. The tendons felt like cables being pulled taut.

“Let us go!” Leo tried to scream, but his voice distorted, warping with each syllable. I watched as scales sprouted along his forearms, iridescent green and orange. I should have been horrified, but my own skin was thickening, slick with a smoky blue that shimmered as it bulged and swelled. My arms contorted, elbows reversing; my hands vanished beneath a mass of muscle and scaly keratin. I fought the panic. Everything itched, everything burned.

The bones in my face cracked audibly. My nose flattened, nostrils pinched down to oblong slits. Jaw stretching, teeth serrating, my vision split as my skull pushed backward, head elongating toward a nightmarish crocodilian snout. My vision sharpened, colors rippling weirdly—infrared threads around the scientists darting behind impact glass.

Spasms wracked my back. Something stabbed through my spine, erupting behind me in a long, bony sail, stretching skin so thin sunlight would glow through it. I roared—no longer a cry but a guttural rumble—and the sound rattled the reinforced walls.

My torso ballooned. Chest broadened, ribcage reshaped—breathing felt different, deeper, with a strange pull low in my gut and between my shoulders. My once-powerful legs shrunk and twisted, rearranging into thick, short hindlimbs ending in splayed, webbed toes. Behind, my tail shot out, lengthening in a rush until it lashed against the table’s edges—powerful, sinuous, thick as a tree trunk.

At the edge of my blurred vision, Leo was convulsing—tail snapping, hands shrinking, teeth protruding from a fierce beaked mouth. Somehow, under the terror, I recognized the form: a triceratops, horns splitting his brow, shield swelling behind his head.

The restraints cracked and snapped. My claws tore free. I reared upright, swaying awkwardly on my new limbs, the great sail arcing over me. Scientists shouted—alarms blared. I swung my head, plowed the glass with my snout. Above the chaos, I heard Leo bellow—a trumpet so vast it shivered the floor.

I was a monster. Yet, through the numbness, a thread of cognition threaded through. Leo—my friend—was with me. Despite everything, we were alive.

And together, as a spinosaurus and a triceratops, we would tear our way out.

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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