Title: **Dino-Genesis: The Survival Code**

**Title: The Scale Between Worlds**

---

### Prologue

I never wanted to be prehistoric. When Professor Lim set up his weird little quantum genetics project in the basement of Hawthorne Labs, my biggest concern was whether I’d get electrocuted again, or if Carla would bring her legendary cold brew for the night shift. I sure didn’t count on fangs, claws, and a never-ending government pursuit. But that’s how these things start: you wake up thinking it’ll be just another day at the office, and by sundown, you’re hiding your six-foot jaw behind a dumpster, contemplating how long it'll be before the D-ACT agents stop hunting you.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If I’m going to have any chance—not just to survive, but to explain—then the story has to start at the very beginning, with me, Jason Kim, ordinary research intern, extraordinary disaster magnet, and unwilling apex predator.

---

### CHAPTER 1: THE PRIMAL CODE

Let me paint the scene. Night in Cambridge, raindrops melting along neon streetlights, and the hum of secret science in the air. I was elbow-deep in circuit boards, with Cam’s playlist reminding me that dinosaurs weren’t supposed to have opposable thumbs—not yet, anyway.

Cam was hunched at the console, eyes flickering with caffeine and code. Carla, our resident biochemical genius and my closest friend, tapped out DNA markers on her tablet.

“Jay, vent the coolant. If this thing overheats again, we may as well join the marshmallow experimenters upstairs.”

“Copy that,” I muttered, flipping the valve.

The heart of our work was the C.R.I.S.P.R.-9 Quantum Splicer—a Frankenstein’s monster of next-gen gene editing and quantum entanglement. Lim’s grand theory: memory, instinct, even phenotype, could be transferred by entangling human DNA with ancient patterns. Trust me, it sounded crazier with each retelling.

We thought we were weeks away from animal trials. I’d been working late, hoping to impress Professor Lim and, let’s be honest, keep my meager stipend. Cam was trying to hack the splicer’s security firmware. Carla worried the genome editor would randomly rewrite our taste for morning pastry into a craving for gravel.

None of us noticed the surge until it hit. The console pulsed violet. My skin prickled. Cam’s terminal blared a warning: “PHASE ANOMALY: EVENT HORIZON”

Carla’s scream turned metallic, echoing from somewhere deep in her chest. Then…agony, everywhere. It felt like my DNA was boiling, every cell being torn apart and reformed. And then: nothing.

When I woke, I was sprawled on the cold tile, mouth tasting copper. Lim was out cold, Carla clutching her side, Cam twitching like someone had reprogrammed his nervous system for a different OS. Blood. Feathers. Scales.

I staggered upright, head throbbing. And in the broken shimmer of the safety mirror, right above my sweat-stained lab coat, glistened a crest of bone. My fingers curled back—not fingers anymore, but thick, scaled claws.

Dinosaurs. Real. Us.

---

### CHAPTER 2: THE HUNTERS AWAKEN

It took us about twelve minutes to piece together what happened. Five to panic, three to hyperventilate, and four to realize the security cameras were blinking red. Something had detected the surge and was coming—no time to analyze, just to react.

My hand—paw?—still jittered as I fumbled open Lim’s desk drawer for the emergency comm jammer.

Cam peeled off his shirt, revealing mottled, purple-grey skin. “Jay, look at this! Carlisle! This isn’t supposed to happen!”

Carla focused, breathing through her pain, her dark hair damp with sweat. She spit a tooth. When she turned, her eyes shimmered yellow-green.

Lim’s phone sounded. One word, electronically modulated: “Evacuate.”

I tried to speak, but my mouth stretched wider, teeth sharper. My words blurred. “Cam, help Lim. Carla, take my arm, now!”

It’s crazy what adrenaline does to a person—especially when you’re two hundred pounds heavier and your heartbeat hammers in your chest like double kick-drums. We tumbled through the corridor, alarms wailing, every flash of red strobing primal terror through my brain.

We barely made it up the stairs before Lim groaned in my arms. “They’re coming,” he whispered. “D-ACT. They want the research. They’ll kill you for what’s inside you now.”

I nodded, and for the first time, noticed a strange, restless hunger in the back of my mind. A predator’s focus. Spinosaurus, whispered a memory from somewhere that wasn’t mine—a walking crocodile with a sail for a back, queen of the river.

“Go,” Lim said, pushing us toward the rear exit.

We burst out, rain washing sweat and blood away, just as a black drone buzzed overhead, its camera lens focusing square on my prehistoric mug.

---

### CHAPTER 3: CHANGELING

For the next week, we ran. Through subway tunnels and abandoned warehouses, through the green cut of Alewife Forest. Turns out, you learn a lot about your limits after you nearly get tranquilized by men in black biohazard suits.

It wasn’t just the agency—D-ACT, the Dinosaur-Anthropomorphic Containment Taskforce, as Carla pieced from intercepted comms. It was the shifts. The closer we got to danger, the more the transformations came—not just for me, but for all of us.

When stressed, I became Spinosaurus. Carla, a feathery Deinonychus, fast and clever, all blade and will. Cam, something with horns and armored plates: a Styracosaurus, unpredictable but fiercely protective.

It wasn’t just our bodies that changed. Sometimes, we felt ancient memories—the pull of lost rivers, the comfort of hoarding sun-warmed stones. I smelled blood from three blocks away. Carla could climb walls. Cam could plow through a locked door with his crest.

But every time we shifted, control slipped—until I learned to surrender just enough, to let the river of ancient instinct run beneath, steering with my mind while my body became something terrifying.

We tried to piece together Lim’s work as we hid. Drives, backups, DNA vials—always one step ahead of D-ACT’s white vans, watched by silent drones.

Carla tried to joke about it once. “At least my grad thesis will have a killer section on transformative adaptation.”

Cam snorted, but I saw fear in his eyes.

We needed help. But who could we trust? And how long before the beasts inside us took over for good?

---

### CHAPTER 4: HUNTED

They caught up with us in Philadelphia.

A tipoff by a sympathetic techie at a gene clinic gave us just enough warning to slip into the flood tunnels beneath the city. Cam was still bitter—they had nearly gotten Carla, and I’d had to shift to full Spino in broad daylight, tearing through a security drone with a swipe of my sail-backed arm.

But one thing kept us ahead: our instincts. D-ACT were good—but their protocols made them predictable. Infrared search patterns. Sonic disablers. They expected monsters, not monsters who could think.

As we fled through the tunnels, I tried to plan ahead. Our only hope was to reach the university in Kansas where Lim had a contact—someone who might know how to reverse this mess. Maybe even show us how to control it, keep the dino at bay.

Trouble was, my Spino side didn’t want to be reversed. It hungered for water, sun, and the chase. Some nights, I’d snap awake to find myself submerged in a storm drain, tail swaying, dreams full of fish and thunder.

Carla was struggling too. “Jason, it’s getting harder. Sometimes I forget which me is me. Which one do you like best: scientist or dino?”

I answered honestly. “I need both. I need you.”

But question was, would we have the choice, or were the old selves fading for good?

The D-ACT agents nearly caught us at Girard Station. White hoods. Tranquilizers. Cam shifted without meaning to, his armor deflecting two darts. But there were too many, and as Carla and I tensed to change, a deep voice boomed behind us:
“This way.”

A figure in a battered coat, face half-hidden, beckoned. “Now, before they recalibrate the inhibitors.”

We ducked into the darkness, following a stranger who seemed to know everything about us—including what we might yet become.

---

### CHAPTER 5: THE OTHER SURVIVORS

He called himself Argyle. Led us to a safe house behind an abandoned pet store. Once inside, he pulled off his hat. Beneath, his skin shimmered burgundy, and his eyes flashed gold.

“There are others like you,” he growled—his r’s elongated, barely human. “First batch, from Lim’s earliest prototypes. Carried the change for years, learned to live with it. D-ACT hunts us all. But you—the accident made you stronger. More… whole.”

We traded stories through the night—of running, hiding, resisting the pull to become something wild. Argyle shared his secret: meditation, practice, learning to respect the beast within.

“It’s not about fighting it,” he counseled me. “It’s about balance.”

Carla pressed. “Can we reverse it?”

Argyle shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. But you can live with it. Learn its boundaries. Defend yourself.”

Cam insisted, “We want out. Quiet. Normal.”

“No such thing for us any longer. But if you want safety, you need leverage. D-ACT runs on secrets, not laws.” He handed me a battered drive. “Proof that their bosses are violating every ethical treaty out there. Go public, you hit them where it hurts.”

The plan was crazy. But as the city crawled with agents, I realized Argyle was right. Hiding wasn’t enough. We had to fight back.

---

### CHAPTER 6: UNLEASHED

We fled west, dodging checkpoints, sending data leaks to the press, uploading videos of D-ACT’s drones tailing us, the monstrous things they’d done to Argyle’s friends who’d been caught.

By Topeka, the world knew dinosaurs were real. Twitter caught fire. The White House denied. D-ACT doubled down. Public opinion wavered between terror and awe.

We rendezvoused at Lim’s old lab in Kansas. It was empty—save for a battered patch of papers and a laptop, left under a loose tile. Carla worked all night, following Lim’s emails and diagrams.

“Lim found a way to stabilize the transformations,” she whispered. “If we can finish his work, maybe we can choose when to be human. When to be dino. Maybe even turn back, for good.”

The trouble was, D-ACT was closing in. They stormed the lab at dawn, bullets rattling over concrete. Cam turned full Styracosaurus, horned head battering walls; Carla darted through shadows, claws flashing.

I felt the Spinosaurus in my blood—the strength, the hunger—and let it take over, but this time, I held on to who I was. Human and dino, balanced, fierce.

We fought our way free—the world watching now, cameras streaming everything. And when a D-ACT agent fired point-blank at Cam, I shifted full primal and knocked her aside, roaring so loud the windows shook.

In the aftermath, America woke up to a new kind of evolution—one where the line between past and present was scrawled in genes and teeth.

---

### CHAPTER 7: THE FUTURE BECKONS

It’s been three months.

Carla runs a research clinic for people like us, teaching balance, control. Cam counsels the newly changed—beats breathing into paper bags. Argyle leads a sanctuary for survivors, helping them fit into a wary world.

Me? I’m learning to swim again. The Spinosaurus inside still calls to me, sometimes—hungry, patient, powerful. But I’m learning to be both.

The agency won’t give up. There are whispers of new threats, new experiments. But now we have allies, a voice, a cause.

Maybe we’re dinosaurs. Maybe we’re human. Or maybe, just maybe, we’re the next step.

The world changed that night in Hawthorne Labs. And somewhere, down the river, a sail-backed shadow reminds everyone that the past is never truly gone—it walks beside us, waiting to be born.

---

### EPILOGUE

Sometimes, when the city sleeps and moonlight spills silver along the water, I stand tall and let the Spinosaurus out. Not as a monster. As a survivor.

I am Jason Kim. Spinosaurus. Human.

And wherever they hunt us, we are not prey. We are the storm.

---

**THE END**

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