"Monsters of Survival: A Science Fiction Tale"

The first thing I remember is the screaming.

A ripping, animal sound in the dark—a sound that, with a sudden horror, I realized was coming from me. The darkness had weight, the kind that pressed behind the eyes. My skin prickled as if an electrical storm was trapped beneath the surface. Then: pain, a roiling, reconfiguring ache in every bone, every muscle, every sinew. I tried to cry for help, but the words—my words—wouldn’t form.

My name is Eliot Reyes. Or it was, before. Before the screaming, before the darkness, before the claws.

#

It started the day Kim and I found the strange glass capsule in the forest. I’d known Kim for years—she was the kind of friend who never ran out of stories. The kind who got you into trouble and out of it, often in the same afternoon.

That day, we’d gone hiking, losing ourselves in the endless hush of pines and filtered sunlight, half-daring each other to wander off the path. I remember the way Kim stopped so suddenly that I barreled into her, nearly sending us both tumbling down a mossy embankment.

Her finger pointed to a glint of green between the tree roots—half-buried, the capsule pulsed with alien patterns, colors that shifted in the corners of your eyes. I should’ve known then. Should’ve pulled her away. But she was already reaching out with one gloved hand, and I heard my own voice, so distant: “Kim, wait—”

#

I woke in a room that was not a room. A cell of mirrors and humming metal, where something watched us through lidless, burning eyes. They called themselves Sarothians—a word that vibrated through my skull and meant nothing until pain taught me its true shape: the architects of what was happening to us.

They said we were to help restore an ancient world. “Your world,” a voice crackled from everywhere and nowhere. “But not as you know it. Through you, we will see the minds that once governed giants.”

Visions swam behind my eyelids: swamps and ferns, a sun burning through primordial steam. My own hands stretched, twisted, claws unfurling from blunt fingertips. My spine arched with a force I could not resist. Kim called out to me—from nearby, or far away, I couldn’t tell. There was only the pain and the horror and the crashing wave of memories that weren’t mine…

#

When it ended, I was still Eliot. Or I thought I was. But then I opened my eyes, and the world was wrong.

Everything dwarfed by my own massive form, my body balanced awkwardly, hunched, impossibly heavy. I tried to stand: a thundering, awkward motion, tail dragging, jaws snapping at empty air. I tried to scream, but my voice was a guttural bellow that shook the mirrored walls.

I caught a reflection—not a face, but a monstrous snout, lined with teeth, slitted eyes burning yellow. Sail-like spines ran down my back, the color mottled between rusty red and forest green. My body was a living relic: Spinosaurus, whispered some alien part of my new mind.

A shadow moved across the far side of the room—large, lumbering, but smaller than me. It moved with a predatory grace, a sickle-shaped claw gleaming as it flexed its talons. Kim. I recognized the alert cleverness in her gaze, the way she studied her new form with something between fear and fascination.

She was a Deinonychus—sleek, feathered, all coiled springs and sudden violence.

I took one heavy step. “Kim?” I rumbled, half-astonished my voice still shaped her name.

She blinked. “Eliot? That’s you?”

We stared at each other—alien, ancient, both familiar and strangers in monstrous forms.

“This can’t be real,” Kim said, her voice oddly chirping at the edges.

Footsteps echoed. The Sarothian speakers pulsed, the world tilting around their voice. “You will adapt. You are subjects of great importance—our link to a vanished age. Learn. Survive. Show us the world that was. Your minds must withstand the instincts of your forms, for only then can we restore what has been lost.”

The walls shimmered. With a jolt, the floor dropped, sending us tumbling into blinding sunlight.

#

We landed hard in a swamp that stank of salt and rot, water trickling between our claws. The Sarothian voices faded, replaced by a cacophony of insect screeches and distant bellows. I felt the ground vibrate—each tremor a message in a language I suddenly understood. Hunger gnawed at me, sharp and alien. The scent of fish drifted from a winding stream nearby.

My body wanted to hunt.

Kim paced at my side, her feathers bristling. “Are you… okay?” she asked, her words clipped, each like a stone tossed into a pool.

“My head’s a mess,” I rumbled, flexing my claws. “I keep thinking about water, about hunting it. And I can smell everything. I think… I think I could eat a horse.” I snorted, a blistering cloud of anger and confusion.

“Let’s not eat any horses,” Kim muttered, glancing at her talons. “Not unless we have to.”

It struck me, then, that we could understand each other—our words translated through whatever was left of our minds and whatever the Sarothians had left us.

We explored—Kim darting ahead, slashing at ferns with her claw. I lumbered behind, slowing at every pool or riverbank as the hunger drove me forward. I caught a fish on instinct: a flash of gold beneath the water, the snap of my jaws too fast to follow.

I felt a kind of savage delight—but also horror. How much of me was left?

#

Days—or weeks—blurred in the swamp. We learned quickly. I carved out a territory along the water, while Kim hunted smaller prey at the forest’s edge. Sometimes our old instincts raged so fiercely that only the memory of who we had been kept us from turning on each other.

Sometimes I lost myself, drifting into a fugue as the Spinosaurus mind took over. I’d wake with blood on my jaws or with Kim pressing against my side, shaking me until I remembered the shape of her name.

We carved out a friendship again—raw, primal, forged in a world of monsters.

The Sarothians would watch, sometimes sending visions into our sleep—alien cartoons of other “subjects,” herds of hadrosaurs or swarms of flying pterosaurs. Kim always woke first, nudging me.

“Maybe we’re part of some intergalactic zoo,” she said one morning. “Or a twisted science experiment.”

I gulped down a wriggling fish. “Don’t care anymore. I just want to get out.”

“Me too,” she said, her eyes sharp. “But if we’re dinosaurs now… maybe we have to think like them.”

#

So we did.

We learned to use our new bodies, to hunt, to hide. Kim’s quick cleverness outwitted predators even larger than me, and my bulk smashed down trees to build a crude nest. We learned to trust the instincts but never surrender, to remind ourselves—every day—of who we had been.

We worked out a language of roars and chirps and gestures, a new bond that needed no words.

Then, one night, the Sarothians came.

A shimmer in the air, a flicker of alien light, and they stood before us—shadowy, tall, with faces that shifted like quicksilver. “You have survived,” they intoned. “You have adapted.”

I wanted to roar at them, to break the spell, but Kim stepped forward, claws gleaming.

“We want to go home,” she said, her voice a hiss of defiance.

A ripple ran through the Sarothians, a sense of amusement. “Are you not home? Your world, as it once was. We could let you live forever, mind and body united—ancient, eternal.”

A thousand memories crashed inside me: the taste of my mother’s cooking, the smell of wet grass after a storm, the laughter of friends around a campfire.

“No,” I growled, every word a battlefield. “We’re not yours to keep.”

Kim raised her head, a chorus of strength in her stance. “We survived because of who we are. Not what you made us.”

There was a pause, long and cold.

“Then you may choose,” the Sarothians finally said. “Return to your old bodies—a gift, but with the knowledge that your time as titans will fade to dream. Or remain as you are, immortals of the lost world.”

I glanced at Kim. She looked at me, eyes brightening with the fire that had always driven her into the unknown.

“Together?” she whispered.

“Always,” I rumbled.

#

The world shimmered, and pain—sharp, victorious—ripped us apart and together again. I woke in a hospital bed, limbs light, heart pounding. On the next bed, Kim grinned at me, her hair a wild tangle, bandaged hands clenching the sheets.

Doctors spoke of a fever, a missing week in the woods, strange wounds no one could explain. We lied, laughing, telling them we’d gotten lost, survived by luck and stubbornness.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still feel the weight of my tail—the hunger for the river, the roar in my bones. I see Kim stretching, testing her fingers as if half-expecting talons to return.

We meet once a month at the old forest edge, laughter echoing in the dusk, always remembering:

We were monsters, once.

And we survived—together.

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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