"The Splice: When Humanity Shifts into Prehistory"

I wasn’t always able to smell water from a mile away, or sunbathe happily in the rain, or split driftwood with a swipe of my claws. Once, I was just Mark—a normal guy, or at least as normal as a guy with three roommates and zero plans for the future at twenty-one could be. Then the world crashed in, the old normal burned away, and something ancient, immense, and scaly swallowed me whole.

***
Sometimes, when the nightmares claw me from sleep, I remember the lab.
We never meant to trespass. After exams, me, Will, Sasha, and Queenie felt invincible, so we crossed old man Burgess’s field and jumped the fence into what used to be a government climate research center. Only it wasn’t quite abandoned—someone had put up motion sensors and new locks. It took precisely five minutes before the spotlights exploded, men in gray suits descended, and we were hauled under gunpoint to the bowels of the building.

It all runs together: bright lights, questions, panic, chemical smells. I remember how Sasha’s voice never wavered as she argued for our release. I remember the terrifying strength in Queenie’s fists as she fought our guards—futile, but impressive. I remember Will putting himself between us and our captors, silly loyal Will who hated conflict, waving his hands and shouting for sense. We lost, of course; they drugged us, restrained us.

When I woke again, nothing made sense. My arms and legs were stretched at odd angles, my tongue was dry as sand, and everything ached. The scientists—one bald man with heavy glasses, three assistants—stared at us with sterile curiosity. I caught pieces of their conversation: "retroviral vector," "genetic integration," "success rates." My veins ran cold.

Then the pain started. It wasn’t sharp but... stretching, rearranging, like a body made of Play-Doh pulled into new shapes. I remember thrashing, screaming, my friends screaming too, then everything blurred together as if I was underwater.

When next I woke, saliva dripped from my jaws and my own skin felt wrong.

***
Have you ever stood on two legs and then tried on four, then six, then eight—and then realized none of them are your own? That’s what it was like. My bones were longer, my neck stretched forward, heavy and armored. My hands—no, not hands—were webbed, ending in hooked claws longer than kitchen knives. My tail was a whip fanning the ground, and my teeth...

I tried to scream. The sound split the air with a guttural bellow that rattled windows. I staggered up, tripping over a tail that wasn’t there before, and crashed headlong into a metal wall. Blood—my blood—splashed onto pristine white.

Something inside me snapped.

The next moments I can only recall in flashes: scientists fleeing, two of my friends shifting, body horror writ large—Queenie shrinking rapidly into a raptor’s form, Will rising huge and solid, breaking from a scaly cocoon as a horned triceratops, Sasha’s shrill, echoing call as she condensed into a pterosaur and snapped her restraints with needle teeth—

I clawed the restraints from my ankles, dug through steel, and smashed through reinforced glass. The room erupted into chaos.

***
Much later—weeks, maybe a month—we would piece together the why: years of illegal experiments, the government sponsor’s hush-hush "Project Proteus," the mad ambition to create living weapons, or perhaps living fossils. Did they choose us at random? Or—in some sick twist—were we the most compatible for the ancient DNA they spliced into us? Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, in my case: massive, semi-aquatic, a hunter from sweltering river deltas of the Cretaceous.

But in those first days after our escape, it was only rage. Rage and confusion, and a desperate, aching need to survive. We stumbled from the ruined facility into midnight woods, naked but for our new monstrous selves.

“Can you—can you understand me?” rumbled Will, words distorted by his triceratops mouth but unmistakably him.

Queenie hissed, her tail twitching, and blinked at us with sharp, slit-pupilled eyes. “I want my body back!”

Sasha, perched atop the remains of a car, flapped her membraned wings experimentally. “Let’s just get out of here before they come after us. We can figure out the rest.”

***
We hid. We learned to change back, little by little: by focusing, by remembering what it felt like to be human, by help from each other. At first, it hurt—every shift sending shocks up our spines. My transformations were the slowest, the most painful; perhaps because the spinosaurus inside me was so large, so unwieldy, body and mind protesting all the while. But sometimes when the night pressed too close, or a scent of blood triggered something deep and primal, I welcomed the monstrous form. There’s real power there—a strength that no human knows.

Time passed. And we realized we were being hunted—all those faceless men in gray, the drones searching the forests, the distant thump of helicopters as we slunk through swamps and abandoned farms at night.

Each of us dealt with it differently.

Queenie embraced her raptor form. She relished the speed and agility, the deadly claws; once, under moonlight, I watched her race a pack of coyotes and leave them in her wake.

Will mourned his old self but adapted. Broad and thoughtful, he found peace in his quiet strength, shielding us, standing sentinel. In his triceratops armor, nothing could harm us.

Sasha soared, sometimes disappearing for hours or days, her pterosaur body cutting high on the winds. She was our eyes, our messenger, the one who found food or warned us when our pursuers got close.

Me? I ached. Sometimes I wished I had been given wings or claws nimble enough for forests, not the body of a thirteen-meter-long, crocodile-faced fish-eater with a sail for a back and more power than a freight train. Until, one shuddering midnight, I slipped into the river—my mind quietly cracking—and discovered the water welcomed me, cool and silent. I swam like I’d been born to it: invisible, uncatchable, more shark than man.

***
Loneliness is the strangest thing. You’d think, changed as we were, running through forest and water, hunted by men with guns and needles, we’d have lost hope. But our bond grew tighter, as if something about the ancient DNA tangled itself not just into our bones, but into our friendship.

Once, cornered in a ruined city, the scientists almost took us. I’ve never known terror like that—tranquilizer darts tracing through moonlight, Queenie hit and half-shifting into her human form, collapsing. Will roaring, blocking her with his horns. Sasha shrieking from above. I felt my own transformation bubbling up—pain, oh god, splitting me in half, my skull lengthening, teeth sliding into place. I charged, three tons of prehistory, tail lashing through concrete, and those with guns fell or ran.

Afterwards, with Queenie in my arms—more raptor than girl, shivering and cursing—Sasha landed beside us, and Will huffed exhaustion. I realized: we had become each others’ family. However we looked, whatever we’d lost, that was something worth keeping.

***
Maybe you expect an ending. Rescue, or revenge; a cure, or a final battle. But life, as always, is messier.

We’ve learned to hide, to survive, to hunt when needed. The scientists still come, sometimes, but less often—they’re afraid of us, now.

The world keeps turning. We’ve even helped people now and then—a hiker lost in the woods, a flood victim pulled from the water. We’re not monsters, not really; we’re just people—people who can become dinosaurs.

As for me: sometimes, when the full moon shines and the river is silver and cold, I slide beneath the surface, Spinosaurus and Mark both, and swim for hours. Sometimes I miss my old life. But mostly, I’m grateful for the friends beside me, whether scaled or feathered or walking on four legs. We are not what we were, but we are together.

And if the world isn’t ready for us?

Too bad. The world had better evolve.

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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