The Smiling

“The company claimed to clone extinct animals that weren’t modified, but of untouched, authentic DNA. For a long time, I scrutinised their statement, having had a dinosaur obsession when I was younger, knowing that they weren’t this ugly or monstrous, but now I’ve had a change in mind, it’s not their fault, it’s the defects from the cloning. I remember six years ago when we cloned this cute little red bird. We named her Daisy because she reminded us of a weird duck. Not surprising that she loved swimming. She was the staff pet and she’d always explore the headquarters, the sanctuary, and play with us, but not for long. One day she wasn’t here. We tried looking everywhere we could, even the hyperloops, all to no avail. Silence reigned for a few years until our contract pilot and some stranger told us about a "big red bird at the dam, swimming and chasing" them. Was that Daisy? Even this big and dangerous now, she still would recognise us, would she? We came to the dam, shivering on the ice and saw nothing, until the most horrific sight I’ve witnessed yet occurred. A huge silhouette sped beneath our feet, and breached the ice. What we lovingly thought as Daisy was instead a decrepit monster, shaking like a reanimated corpse. She indeed got much bigger, but not only that, the ugly, demonic look on her face made my heart churn, the stare of its cat-like eyes and unnatural snare of its toothy grin (scarily growing towards its neck) into my soul. She lost some feathers and her face looked ugly, plus those growths and tumours around her poor body. She was now angrier than we knew. Someone tried feeding her one of her favourite snacks, but she took no notice and brutally ended him. Years would pass, nothing about Daisy once again, but she’d return even worse. We heard horrific, elephantine trumpets and saw many corpses of even tyrannosaurs in the woods, something alien arrived. The poor old Daisy was struggling from her defects from long ago, now looking like an eldritch abomination, crawling with just two twisted legs, with her mouth smiling up to her torso, and eyes, growths other mouths creepily everywhere. Now I know the truth of the animals here, and it is grim.”

I just made this horror piece as a nod to how creepy the snarey face of the Pyroraptor from Jurassic World Dominion is. That smile… And Biosyn claims to be resurrecting pure-genome animals. I was also inspired by Gemini Home Entertainment’s Deep Root Disease making this.

Feathered, still not without being a hellspawn. Really is a fire thief. From Jurassic World Dominion.