Editor’s note: This is a serial novel, with each chapter written by a different published author. There will be eight chapters in all. Catch up on the previous six (they’re short and fun to read) by clicking these links: Chapter One by Rachel Siegel, Chapter Two by Jess Bennett, Chapter Three by Sam Bittman, Chapter Four by Daniel Tawczynski, Chapter Five by Matt Tanenbaum and Chapter Six by Tom Cathcart. And come back next week for the grand finale. Lots of surprises in store.
Of the fifteen eggs that were sucked out of Marion at the highest financial tier of the donor market (it was the Yale pedigree that jacked up the price), there remained twelve that were not immediately used to produce brainy and beautiful children for rich and barren couples. These twelve resided in the MIT laboratory of Dr. Claus Yudkin, chairman of the university’s Human Reproduction Research Laboratory. Yudkin, a Russian-born wizard, had twice been short listed for the Nobel Prize.
All twelve of the remaining eggs were transformed to in vitro embryos and then frozen as part of Yudkin’s research on the viability of frozen embryos over time. Did they lose qualities after years in the freezer? Was a forty-year-old embryo less “gifted” in any way than a ten-year-old embryo? Yudkin pinpointed six DNA markers and created an algorithm for measuring changes, even minute changes down to .001 degrees. Marion’s eggs were a gift from the gods for his research.
That is until his overwrought, foggy-brained lab assistant, Ralph Reggerson, threw a monkey in the works by defrosting all twelve embryos in one fell swoop. It was devastating. Unforgivable. Right up until it led to a fantastic, totally unpredictable discovery.
It was out of sheer, fatigue-induced carelessness that Ralph Reggerson was wearing his high pitch sound detector when he entered the room-size refrigerator of the Human Reproduction Research Laboratory at MIT. Ralph, a grad student who received substantial tuition reduction for doing relatively menial tasks for Professor Yudkin, thought the job was well worth his time, even if it subtracted hours from his thesis project on the high-pitched sounds emitted by plants when they are cut. Reggerson’s long days consisted of racing from classroom to the library to Yudkin’s lab and back to his cramped, single room apartment in Dedham, where he studied and worked on his thesis. He was thirty years old, in debt, single, and suffered from asthma exacerbated by stress. At times, the stress was so great that he scrunched up his face, opened his mouth, and emitted a choked scream that came out so high pitched it made his wine glass quiver.
At the end of each work period in Yudkin’s lab, Ralph filled in a form, detailing what he had done–cleaned the sink, vacuumed the floor, threw out used rubber gloves and replaced them with new ones. In the Comments box, he hesitated before noting the high-pitched sound in the refrigerator room. Would he need to include his explanation of why he was wearing a sensor, that it was the result of his foggy-brained forgetfulness? Could that get him fired? But, depressed and insecure or not, Ralph believed in honesty, in full disclosure. Otherwise, he would become even more anxious.
So he wrote: “Some or all of the recently thawed in vitro embryos emitted a 120-180 decibel wavering sound, similar to the ‘scream’ issued by cut plants.”
In addition to his vaunted analytic abilities, Yudkin possessed a prodigious and rather romantic imagination. He often said that true creativity came from holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time.
After listening to the recordings of the thawed embryos through a sonic filter, Dr. Claus Yudkin, beamed and said, “Marvelous! It sounds like the music of the spheres in outer space. The cosmos singing its beautiful, mournful song. It is said that the whale’s whistles and pulsed calls are its echoes, even if common knowledge states that these sounds were for the whale’s underwater navigation…And now your remarkable discovery, Mr. Reggerson. Twelve thawed in vitro embryos singing to us after they had been frozen for decades. What do you make of it?”
“Of the song?”
“Yes, what does it say? What is it telling us?”
Ralph Reggerson, the anxious and asthmatic graduate student who spent hours each day listening to the screams and moans of slashed plants, felt his eyes water.
“It is a song of loneliness,” he said quietly. “A cry for attention. Me! Take me! Hear my yearning. I am tortured by a sense of incompleteness. Of having so much Potential and not a ray of Actual. I cannot remain in suspension any longer – I need to finally Become.”
In the summer of 2023, Yudkin and Reggerson published an article in the Journal of Reproductive Research, entitled, “Embryo Communication”, in which they cite the experiments done in his laboratory with in vitro fertilized human eggs. His data demonstrated that these fertilized eggs possessed an ultrasonic means of communicating with one another, a sound that bears a remarkable resemblance to the ambient music in space, the so-called “music of the spheres”.
In the article, they only identify the source of the fertilized eggs as a Yale-educated Caucasian woman in her thirties who had sold them on the highest demand stratum of the open “donor” market, for hundreds of thousands of American dollars. Several of her eggs had been used to produce offspring for infertile couples. The leftovers were frozen, and only recently (and inadvertently) thawed for an experiment Yudkin was conducting on the viability of eggs frozen decades ago.
The article was not well received in the science community. One Harvard professor went on record with, “Yudkin should study marbles instead of embryos. He seems to have lost a lot of them.”
