"Rebirth of Predators"

I woke up in total darkness, my wrists tingling from where they’d been strapped. The only sound was frantic breathing—my own and someone else’s. My tongue felt too big for my mouth.

“Sam?” A shaky voice—Devin’s—echoed faintly. I tried to answer, but my throat rasped out only a croak.

Overhead, a single spotlight crashed on, blinding me white. The chemical tang in the air made my nostrils flare, unnervingly sensitive. Metal restraints hissed, and I realized I was pinned on a cold slab, fingers curled over the edge. Except—my fingers were wrong: thicker, the nails warped into black claws.

“Sam! Something’s—” Devin was cut off by a guttural yelp. I twisted, but the leather bands bit dug into my chest, and an odd pressure swelled along my spine.

A white-coated figure drifted into the edge of my vision. “Stage one: initialization,” she murmured. “Scaling and cranial adjustment active. Spinosaurus parameters set.”

Pain raked down my back, boiling under my skin. I panted, the air rasping hotter, throat stretching. My jaw creaked—longer—pulling forward, my teeth felt like they rearranged, sharpening. My tongue flicked over them: they were jagged, serrated, and disturbingly familiar.

Pressure built along my spine, as if invisible steel rods poked outward. My head lolled; I glimpsed my forearm as scaly green skin swept over it in shimmering waves. My wrist snapped, widened, and the restraints popped, letting my arm—now more a heavy forelimb—crash to the metal table.

A hot itching chased up my neck to my skull. My vision doubled, then shifted as my eyes slid sideways on my elongating head. The world became sharper—colors split, edges flared—and the smells. Earthy, electric, metallic. I could smell the ocean, though we were nowhere near one.

Suddenly, my chest surged against the bands—a sail-like spiny ridge burst from my back, splitting the thin cloth of my hospital gown. I screamed, but it spiraled into a deep, guttural roar. My legs snapped hard, folding, muscles popping and bones reknitting, my hips broadening to support my new, massive tail that lashed with primal energy.

Beside me, Devin wailed as her own voice collapsed into a high-pitched shriek. I twisted my massive jaws to see her, mid-transformation—her nose had flattened into a beak, skin feathering yellow and blue, limbs fusing into wings. Quetzalcoatlus, my brain quaked, dredging up a memory from a Natural History documentary.

With a final jolt, the restraints split. I thrashed, the table crumpling beneath me as I rolled onto all fours, tail smacking against cold tile. My sight—doubled, predatory—scanned the woman in white, who stumbled back as I opened jaws longer than she was tall, lining with overlapping teeth.

“Magnificent,” she breathed.

I could smell her terror: alive, animal, sweet. Deep inside, a spark—the last of who I was—cried out through the storm of primal sensation, training my massive claws near Devin, protecting her as she adjusted her wings.

We locked eyes—her, a giant, trembling pterosaur, me towering over everything, with colors spinning across my sail.

“Sam?” she said, voice vibrating and strange but still there.

I nodded, swinging my daunting snout in a wordless vow. Whatever had happened, whatever we’d become, I’d break us out. Together.

The scientist ran. We roared—old friends with new bodies—testing strength, remembering, and planning our escape from this monstrous rebirth.

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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