"Tales of the Shifted Siblings: Escaping the Experiment"
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I don’t remember the van that took me. I only remember the blinding glare of its headlights and the sound of my little brother, David, yelling my name. The rest is a stream of faces with bright masks, needles pressing against my skin, the world tilting sideways and then, darkness.
When I woke up, my wrists were bruised from restraints, and every bone in my body ached. There was an odd, throbbing pain in my jaw—deep in the bone, like my teeth wanted to crawl out of my mouth. My tongue felt swollen. I tried to speak, but all that came out was a hoarse rasp.
Above me, fluorescent lights flickered on a low ceiling. The room itself was bare metal—a cell, though I didn’t understand that yet. My mouth tasted sour, as if I’d chewed on copper wires all night. I tried to move, found the cuffs on my wrists and ankles fixed to the cot. It took a second before I noticed the two figures slumped in beds beside me.
David was there, still. His dark curls matted to his forehead with sweat. My sister, Rachel, nodded groggily at the sound of me moving. She looked awful—eyes rimmed red, jaw clenched tight with fury. When she locked eyes with me, I knew she was as scared as I was.
We tried to talk, but our voices were slurred, and every time the door hissed open, men and women in lab coats flooded the room, poking us with needles and flashing lights in our eyes. We learned nothing, except that “the program” was “progressing well.”
We stopped being normal kids. We learned to trust our instincts—not what anyone told us. Most importantly, we learned what the pain in our bones meant.
The first time it happened, David was panicking. He hated needles—still does, even now. A woman in a mask cornered him with a syringe the size of a turkey baster. His whole body arched. He screamed, but it was a growl—a guttural roar so loud it rattled the plates in the wall. One second there was my terrified eleven-year-old brother, and then the cot exploded, shredded by black talons, and a velociraptor burst out of the sheets.
The next time, it was me. I always thought I was the tough one—the oldest, the protector. Turns out even I could break. It happened on the third day, or maybe the fourth. I’d lost count.
They came at me with a bigger needle, larger than any they’d used on David. Whatever serum they pumped into my veins burned like acid. My skin crawled with energy, and suddenly, I was burning from the inside out. A deep shudder ran through my whole body, and I screamed—except it wasn’t my voice. My scream echoed off the walls, resonant and inhuman.
Bones cracked. Skin split. My spine stretched and curved, and I doubled over with a wet, sickening crunch. I felt my jaw jut forward, my face split by rows of knife-long teeth. Claws burst from my hands, ripping open the restraints. My whole body swelled, muscle and scale replacing flesh. My skin tightened, hardened, and something heavy slid down my back—something I couldn’t see, but could feel, stiff and ridged, like a sail rising behind me.
The world swam in new colors and new sounds—the scent of fear from the doctors, bright tinges of blood, ozone, and antiseptic. I roared—and the room shattered: glass, metal, men, and women scattered from the force. I slashed through the door, through the armed guards, every inch of my enormous, reptilian body screaming with power.
I remember everything—the whumps of gunfire barely stinging my hide, the singe of tranquilizer darts and electricity. I was ten feet tall at the shoulder, forty feet long from snout to tail, all dark, mottled scales. I was a spinosaurus—a river dragon, a beast with jaws able to slice a man in half, a sail fin so vast it scraped the ceiling. I was hungry, confused, angry.
But I remembered my siblings. I remembered I was still Nick.
#
We didn’t escape that first night.
Whatever they’d done to us, the scientists were prepared. They swarmed me as I raged, and when they pumped tranquilizers into my flank, I felt the world get heavy and slow, my eyes closing, my rage fading as I dropped.
I woke in a tank—a real one, ten times the size of my last room, three walls glass, the fourth an opaque mirror so thick even my claws couldn’t scratch it. I tried, though. I tried for hours, until my claws dulled and dark blood pooled beneath me. The only thing that stopped me was Rachel’s voice.
“Nick! Hey—c’mon, big guy! Change back—we need to talk!”
I didn’t even realize I could—until I tried. I focused, listening to her voice as she called my name and promised she’d hide David if I scared him. I imagined myself as I was before—all knobby knees, bare feet, scarred knuckles—and somehow, I began to shrink. My vision blurred, my sail withdrew; my jaws shortened, my claws retracted. I doubled over in agony as bones rearranged and skin softened until, finally, I was just a boy again, naked and shivering on the floor of the tank.
Rachel—still a human, but eyes fierce and wild—threw me an oversized lab coat. She’d already rummaged through the lockers. “I think we can do it at will,” she murmured, bandaging my bleeding hand. “I watched you change. Watched myself, too...”
I stared. “You—?”
She nodded, fiercely proud. “Triceratops. Not as flashy as you, I guess, but I can ram through doors.”
“And David?”
“Still hiding. He’s your shadow when he gets scared.”
We huddled, cold and frightened, at the base of the mirror wall, whispering our fears until the intercom crackled to life above us.
“Progress noted,” the voice intoned. “You are adapting well. Now, the real tests begin.”
#
They released us from the cell—sort of.
An endless maze of corridors, doors, and observation chambers became our world. Sometimes a door opened into a gymnasium where armed guards ringed the space, and another time into a forest built under artificial sun—dense ferns, fake rivers, all plastic but disturbingly real. We were watched every step, every shift; feeding time became a game, with raw slabs of meat delivered via trapdoors.
Rachel—my triceratops sister—grew braver, her horns harder every time she forced a shift. She hated the scientists but insisted we play along, just enough to win time to plot an escape. David vanished whenever he felt danger—first as a boy, then as a little brown raptor, hiding in the shadows, darting in and out of the vents.
Me? I learned the limits of the spinosaurus. I learned I could swim—God, how I could swim. They gave me a pool for an “enrichment exercise,” never expecting me to drag an entire metal platform underwater in a single lunge and destroy their observation equipment in two seconds flat. I learned to hunt by scent, smell the fear in my keepers, feel the beat of their nervous hearts.
Still, no matter what they promised us—release, family, food—I remembered why we had to run.
One night, Rachel and I heard screaming from the next chamber over. David’s voice.
We pounded on the walls. The intercom cackled, “Subject C-3 is noncompliant. Application of stimulus in process.” His screams went on and on, until they were hoarse shrieks, then little mewing noises, then silence.
I never forgave them for that.
#
The plan to escape wasn’t mine—it was Rachel’s, of course. She’d always been the smart one, the one who believed strength was in planning, not anger.
“They need us to perform,” she said, watching the guards monitor us through the one-way glass. “So we stop playing. Not tonight. We do the opposite. We make ourselves useless.”
That day, when the guards herded us for “testing,” we went limp, unresponsive, bodies refusing to shift no matter what drugs they pumped into us. Rachel recited math equations quietly to herself. I pictured my old bedroom, every memory I had that made me Nick, not someone else’s monster.
Three days into our rebellion, the facility changed tactics. They starved us. No food, no water, just a silence that pressed down like a stone.
“I have to shift,” David whispered, voice trembling. “I can’t…I can’t hold the raptor in.”
Rachel took his hand. “Not yet. Hold on, little brother.”
We traded stories—if only to keep from going mad.
I told them about the time I found a real spinosaurus jaw at the natural history museum. How I’d stood for an hour, staring at the teeth, imagining the animal that once owned them. I couldn’t have known how real that imagination would become—or how much I’d come to miss having nothing but the risk of a quiz the next day to worry about.
#
On the fifth day, the scientists made a mistake. They tried to break us with a demonstration—a new subject, a girl thrown into our cell in tears. She was younger than David, barely nine, trembling with terror. When we clustered close, she whimpered, “They want you to change. They told me they’d hurt my mom if you didn’t. Please don’t.”
We refused. Even as the intercom blared, taunting us, we did not shift.
Rachel winked. “Now. Nick—when they open the door…”
I nodded, tense. A guard stormed in, gun drawn. Rachel flung herself at him. She transformed mid-leap—her skin roughening, sprouting a horn, expanding to a hulking, three-horned beast. The guard fired, but the tranquilizer dart bounced off her bone-plated skull.
I roared, my spinosaurus rage erupting from my gut. My skin cracked and split; my jaws: a thousand knives. The air warped as I smashed through the glass, claws slashing, tail lashing. Smell of copper and cordite. Rachel rammed aside three guards at once, horns tossing them like ragdolls.
David shrieked—but it wasn’t human. The raptor burst from his skin, fast as thought, a streak of claws and teeth. He darted into the hallway, shadows bending around him as bullets whined overhead. We crashed into the heart of the facility—rooms, labs, and storage bins all blurring by.
When the alarms blared and the doors slammed, Rachel lowered her head, broke through every barrier. I swept aside walls with my tail, felt steel buckle under my claws.
Behind us, the scientists screamed. I pitied them—they had made us into this, monsters who refused to be controlled.
We escaped through the water wing, into a cavernous drain lined with algae and darkness. Even as I waded into the pool, I sensed David slinking through the pipes above, Rachel bulldozing debris into our pursuers’ path. We slipped from their grasp like shadows into the night.
#
It’s been months since then. We’re ghosts now—urban legends, the monsters who rampaged through a secret lab and vanished without a trace. The government is always one step behind, chasing rumors: dinosaur shadows seen in old subway tunnels, unexplained attacks on livestock, water mains buckling with impossible force.
We’re careful. Our shifts are controlled—sometimes more than others. David likes to climb rooftops and scare pigeons; Rachel, always the protector, keeps us moving, hiding from satellites and sensors. I, Nick—the spinosaurus—am happiest near the water, sliding into rivers or old canals, feeling the current against my broad, scaled belly.
Sometimes, in dreams, I see that cell again: the tanks, the cold lights, the fear. I wake up in a panic, claws gouging mud or tile, my sail scraping the ceiling of whatever hideout we’ve found that night. But then David laughs, or Rachel tucks a stolen blanket around my shoulders. I remember who we are—not their subjects, but siblings, together in this strange new power.
We don’t know how to be normal anymore.
But we know how to be family.
We know how to survive.
And as I slip beneath the moonlit river, sail trailing ripples behind me, I realize: I was never truly hunted by the world—not as long as the people I love are close enough to follow in my wake.
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
Prompt: Write me a very long story about a person and his siblings who can turn into dinosaurs at will after being kidnapped by a facility with him being a spinosaurus from first person
Response: I don’t remember the van that took me. I only remember the blinding glare of its headlights and the sound of my little brother, David, yelling my name. The rest is a stream of faces with bright masks, needles pressing against my skin, the world tilting sideways and then, darkness. When I woke up, my wrists were bruised from restraints, and every bone in my body ached. There was an odd, throbbing pain in my jaw—deep in the bone, like my teeth wanted to crawl out of my mouth. My tongue felt swollen. I tried to speak, but all that came out was a hoarse rasp. Above me, fluorescent lights flickered on a low ceiling. The room itself was bare metal—a cell, though I didn’t understand that yet. My mouth tasted sour, as if I’d chewed on copper wires all night. I tried to move, found the cuffs on my wrists and ankles fixed to the cot. It took a second before I noticed the two figures slumped in beds beside me. David was there, still. His dark curls matted to his forehead with sweat. My sister, Rachel, nodded groggily at the sound of me moving. She looked awful—eyes rimmed red, jaw clenched tight with fury. When she locked eyes with me, I knew she was as scared as I was. We tried to talk, but our voices were slurred, and every time the door hissed open, men and women in lab coats flooded the room, poking us with needles and flashing lights in our eyes. We learned nothing, except that “the program” was “progressing well.” We stopped being normal kids. We learned to trust our instincts—not what anyone told us. Most importantly, we learned what the pain in our bones meant. The first time it happened, David was panicking. He hated needles—still does, even now. A woman in a mask cornered him with a syringe the size of a turkey baster. His whole body arched. He screamed, but it was a growl—a guttural roar so loud it rattled the plates in the wall. One second there was my terrified eleven-year-old brother, and then the cot exploded, shredded by black talons, and a velociraptor burst out of the sheets. The next time, it was me. I always thought I was the tough one—the oldest, the protector. Turns out even I could break. It happened on the third day, or maybe the fourth. I’d lost count. They came at me with a bigger needle, larger than any they’d used on David. Whatever serum they pumped into my veins burned like acid. My skin crawled with energy, and suddenly, I was burning from the inside out. A deep shudder ran through my whole body, and I screamed—except it wasn’t my voice. My scream echoed off the walls, resonant and inhuman. Bones cracked. Skin split. My spine stretched and curved, and I doubled over with a wet, sickening crunch. I felt my jaw jut forward, my face split by rows of knife-long teeth. Claws burst from my hands, ripping open the restraints. My whole body swelled, muscle and scale replacing flesh. My skin tightened, hardened, and something heavy slid down my back—something I couldn’t see, but could feel, stiff and ridged, like a sail rising behind me. The world swam in new colors and new sounds—the scent of fear from the doctors, bright tinges of blood, ozone, and antiseptic. I roared—and the room shattered: glass, metal, men, and women scattered from the force. I slashed through the door, through the armed guards, every inch of my enormous, reptilian body screaming with power. I remember everything—the whumps of gunfire barely stinging my hide, the singe of tranquilizer darts and electricity. I was ten feet tall at the shoulder, forty feet long from snout to tail, all dark, mottled scales. I was a spinosaurus—a river dragon, a beast with jaws able to slice a man in half, a sail fin so vast it scraped the ceiling. I was hungry, confused, angry. But I remembered my siblings. I remembered I was still Nick. # We didn’t escape that first night. Whatever they’d done to us, the scientists were prepared. They swarmed me as I raged, and when they pumped tranquilizers into my flank, I felt the world get heavy and slow, my eyes closing, my rage fading as I dropped. I woke in a tank—a real one, ten times the size of my last room, three walls glass, the fourth an opaque mirror so thick even my claws couldn’t scratch it. I tried, though. I tried for hours, until my claws dulled and dark blood pooled beneath me. The only thing that stopped me was Rachel’s voice. “Nick! Hey—c’mon, big guy! Change back—we need to talk!” I didn’t even realize I could—until I tried. I focused, listening to her voice as she called my name and promised she’d hide David if I scared him. I imagined myself as I was before—all knobby knees, bare feet, scarred knuckles—and somehow, I began to shrink. My vision blurred, my sail withdrew; my jaws shortened, my claws retracted. I doubled over in agony as bones rearranged and skin softened until, finally, I was just a boy again, naked and shivering on the floor of the tank. Rachel—still a human, but eyes fierce and wild—threw me an oversized lab coat. She’d already rummaged through the lockers. “I think we can do it at will,” she murmured, bandaging my bleeding hand. “I watched you change. Watched myself, too...” I stared. “You—?” She nodded, fiercely proud. “Triceratops. Not as flashy as you, I guess, but I can ram through doors.” “And David?” “Still hiding. He’s your shadow when he gets scared.” We huddled, cold and frightened, at the base of the mirror wall, whispering our fears until the intercom crackled to life above us. “Progress noted,” the voice intoned. “You are adapting well. Now, the real tests begin.” # They released us from the cell—sort of. An endless maze of corridors, doors, and observation chambers became our world. Sometimes a door opened into a gymnasium where armed guards ringed the space, and another time into a forest built under artificial sun—dense ferns, fake rivers, all plastic but disturbingly real. We were watched every step, every shift; feeding time became a game, with raw slabs of meat delivered via trapdoors. Rachel—my triceratops sister—grew braver, her horns harder every time she forced a shift. She hated the scientists but insisted we play along, just enough to win time to plot an escape. David vanished whenever he felt danger—first as a boy, then as a little brown raptor, hiding in the shadows, darting in and out of the vents. Me? I learned the limits of the spinosaurus. I learned I could swim—God, how I could swim. They gave me a pool for an “enrichment exercise,” never expecting me to drag an entire metal platform underwater in a single lunge and destroy their observation equipment in two seconds flat. I learned to hunt by scent, smell the fear in my keepers, feel the beat of their nervous hearts. Still, no matter what they promised us—release, family, food—I remembered why we had to run. One night, Rachel and I heard screaming from the next chamber over. David’s voice. We pounded on the walls. The intercom cackled, “Subject C-3 is noncompliant. Application of stimulus in process.” His screams went on and on, until they were hoarse shrieks, then little mewing noises, then silence. I never forgave them for that. # The plan to escape wasn’t mine—it was Rachel’s, of course. She’d always been the smart one, the one who believed strength was in planning, not anger. “They need us to perform,” she said, watching the guards monitor us through the one-way glass. “So we stop playing. Not tonight. We do the opposite. We make ourselves useless.” That day, when the guards herded us for “testing,” we went limp, unresponsive, bodies refusing to shift no matter what drugs they pumped into us. Rachel recited math equations quietly to herself. I pictured my old bedroom, every memory I had that made me Nick, not someone else’s monster. Three days into our rebellion, the facility changed tactics. They starved us. No food, no water, just a silence that pressed down like a stone. “I have to shift,” David whispered, voice trembling. “I can’t…I can’t hold the raptor in.” Rachel took his hand. “Not yet. Hold on, little brother.” We traded stories—if only to keep from going mad. I told them about the time I found a real spinosaurus jaw at the natural history museum. How I’d stood for an hour, staring at the teeth, imagining the animal that once owned them. I couldn’t have known how real that imagination would become—or how much I’d come to miss having nothing but the risk of a quiz the next day to worry about. # On the fifth day, the scientists made a mistake. They tried to break us with a demonstration—a new subject, a girl thrown into our cell in tears. She was younger than David, barely nine, trembling with terror. When we clustered close, she whimpered, “They want you to change. They told me they’d hurt my mom if you didn’t. Please don’t.” We refused. Even as the intercom blared, taunting us, we did not shift. Rachel winked. “Now. Nick—when they open the door…” I nodded, tense. A guard stormed in, gun drawn. Rachel flung herself at him. She transformed mid-leap—her skin roughening, sprouting a horn, expanding to a hulking, three-horned beast. The guard fired, but the tranquilizer dart bounced off her bone-plated skull. I roared, my spinosaurus rage erupting from my gut. My skin cracked and split; my jaws: a thousand knives. The air warped as I smashed through the glass, claws slashing, tail lashing. Smell of copper and cordite. Rachel rammed aside three guards at once, horns tossing them like ragdolls. David shrieked—but it wasn’t human. The raptor burst from his skin, fast as thought, a streak of claws and teeth. He darted into the hallway, shadows bending around him as bullets whined overhead. We crashed into the heart of the facility—rooms, labs, and storage bins all blurring by. When the alarms blared and the doors slammed, Rachel lowered her head, broke through every barrier. I swept aside walls with my tail, felt steel buckle under my claws. Behind us, the scientists screamed. I pitied them—they had made us into this, monsters who refused to be controlled. We escaped through the water wing, into a cavernous drain lined with algae and darkness. Even as I waded into the pool, I sensed David slinking through the pipes above, Rachel bulldozing debris into our pursuers’ path. We slipped from their grasp like shadows into the night. # It’s been months since then. We’re ghosts now—urban legends, the monsters who rampaged through a secret lab and vanished without a trace. The government is always one step behind, chasing rumors: dinosaur shadows seen in old subway tunnels, unexplained attacks on livestock, water mains buckling with impossible force. We’re careful. Our shifts are controlled—sometimes more than others. David likes to climb rooftops and scare pigeons; Rachel, always the protector, keeps us moving, hiding from satellites and sensors. I, Nick—the spinosaurus—am happiest near the water, sliding into rivers or old canals, feeling the current against my broad, scaled belly. Sometimes, in dreams, I see that cell again: the tanks, the cold lights, the fear. I wake up in a panic, claws gouging mud or tile, my sail scraping the ceiling of whatever hideout we’ve found that night. But then David laughs, or Rachel tucks a stolen blanket around my shoulders. I remember who we are—not their subjects, but siblings, together in this strange new power. We don’t know how to be normal anymore. But we know how to be family. We know how to survive. And as I slip beneath the moonlit river, sail trailing ripples behind me, I realize: I was never truly hunted by the world—not as long as the people I love are close enough to follow in my wake.
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