Before this week’s story, just wanted to reiterate that I am starting a second substack on my experience parenting my newborn son, Jack. I am not sure how often I’ll post, but I have one ready to go out at some point this week and will just go from there. You can subscribe at www.thejackfiles.substack.com if you’re so inclined, and please do share that link widely with anyone interested in dad-blogging content. And now, this week’s story:
The Spark of Life
*I don’t see what the big deal is, like somebody created all of us, you know? Now they’re spendin’ a hundred million to try to make some new shit that can’t even talk, whoop de dah. I just had’ta pay eleven bucks for a box of rubbers to stop from making life when I go over to Lacey’s later on, know what I’m sayin’? Like how special is it, really, if they can mix some shit together and make some bacteria or whatever the fuck. I can make a baby by thrusting, where’s my fuckin’ Nobel prize?”
*
“I’m ovulating,” said Shannon, stage whispering into her cellphone and looking around the break room to make sure no one from her team overheard her. She didn’t want any of them to know they were trying to conceive, because then she’d have to deal with the inquiries and expressions of hope. But the calendar told her it was the day, and they were far enough into this process that she was not inclined to waste a chance, even if she had to talk about it on her phone in the lab.
“Did you hear that?” She said, louder now that she didn’t have to say the ‘O’ word.
“Yeah,” said her husband Dale, “Want me to leave early?”
“I’m faking sick, I’ll be home in thirty, have your pants off.”
She hung up and turned back to face the empty break room. Twenty paces away through an open door, she could hear her team leader bent over a workstation in conference with a junior analyst, going over the numbers for the hundredth time, fine-tuning the temperature and electrical field conditions for the attempt.
They knew the world was watching, and they could afford no mistakes.
“I’m going home,” she said as she exited. “You two should too. What the hell are you doing anyway, we checked every detail for the hundredth time a month ago.”
Her team leader looked up at her from the workstation and smiled.
“Just trying to control the miracle, Shan. Can’t hurt, can it?”
“Be back here with forty-eight hours to go, and make sure you’ve slept.”
*
“Thanks for being on the show, Professor. To begin, could you explain the Fermi Paradox to us, and its relevance to the experiments being conducted this week?”
“Certainly. The essence of the Fermi Paradox is a single question: Where are all the aliens? Even if life is uncommon in the universe, and even if intelligent life is uncommon among the universe’s life, still, given the number of stars and planets in the universe, and given the age of the universe, there should have existed thousands if not millions of intelligent species in its history.
“If any of those civilizations became star-faring, as it seems likely at least some would have, they would have started to expand exponentially, as each new settled star system sent probes out to multiple others. Even if faster-than-light travel is literally impossible, at any reasonable percentage of light speed, they could have colonized their entire galaxy in a matter of millennia. Such a civilization would also be quite resilient, since even the destruction of an entire planet by asteroid impact, for example, would represent only a small setback in civilizational terms.
“With thousands or millions of intelligent civilizations having existed in the history of the galaxy, the galaxy should be full. And yet it is empty. And not mostly empty, completely devoid of any evidence of any other civilizations. We have never detected one single trace of any other life, even non-intelligent life, anywhere besides Earth.
“There are many possible explanations of this phenomenon. One of them is that the spark of life is very, very rare. In that case, humanity simply exists in a very, very unusual world, and almost the entire rest of the universe is empty planets and unobserved stars. It is this possibility that today’s experiment is designed to investigate. If the research team is able to create life from inert chemicals, that will indicate that life is likely not so rare, and we will have to look for other solutions to Fermi’s Paradox.”
*
Shannon and her husband were in their eighth month of trying to get pregnant, and it was no longer exciting. The first month had given rise to some of the hottest sex of their entire relationship. Then the interminable two-week wait between ovulation and her menses, followed by tears when she bled. They googled statistics on conception rates and reassured themselves that nothing was wrong. They looked forward to trying again.
Now they were past the statistics. It should have happened by now. They played games to keep it fun, tried to make the mundane and obligatory into something spontaneous, and tried not to talk too much about the what ifs. Shannon knew that conversation was coming, if it didn’t happen soon. She thought at a year they should start discussing fertility treatments, and she thought she could feel the same sort of timeline in Dale’s mind, but they weren’t ready for that conversation yet.
She always loved the feel of her husband’s body pressed into hers, the familiar smell of him, the noises they both made, the familiarity of the sensations working a different magic than their novelty once had. But today as they made love she couldn’t help thinking about her lab and the experiment there. Not about whether it would succeed, though that thought was always tossing around the back of her mind. But today she wondered if she would trade that professional creation of life to make a life inside of her. She knew it was a trade she would never have the opportunity to make, but she couldn’t help but wonder.
The literature said that stress could suppress ovulation, or throw off its timing. The entire time they had been trying was in the run up to the experiment, and she’d never been so stressed in her life, so maybe in a sense she was trading a pregnancy to advance her research.
But she banished that question from her mind as soon as it formed. They were seventy-two hours away from the attempt, and after this month, the stress would be reduced, no matter what the outcome. And of course, she had no control group, no version of herself that had lived the last eight months without stress to see whether that person got pregnant. She would never truly know what she had cost herself.
She tried to be present with her husband, who never seemed to worry so much about these things. She could tell he was enjoying it, and that had probably never occurred to him to wonder if the stress of an upcoming trial was lowering his sperm count. She envied him that. But still she wondered.
*
“So how’n heck is this shit suppos’ta work?”
“News said it was chemicals.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Chemicals are like bleach and stuff, like I think water’s a chemical too.”
“I know what chemicals is, I ain’t a damn idiot. But they ain’t gonna just like mix bleach’n water. If that worked they’d be makin’ life cleanin’ up the Jimmy John’s.”
“Them scientists prolly ain’t mixin’ ‘em in a mop bucket or nothin’, they got like special machines.”
“Like what? Like one’a them Slurpee machines wit’ the arm goin' ‘round, like Seven-Eleven?”
“Yeah, prolly like that, but it’s gotta be bigger, right?”
“Why’s it gotta be bigger? You could stuff a dog in a Slurpee machine, dog’s alive.”
“All right, it’s Slurpee-size I guess.”
*
Conception is such a small thing, and there are so many factors. Temperature and timing, strength and receptivity, the expression of an unknown number of genes in the male and the female chromosomes, they all go into one tiny little microscopic sperm swimming successfully into an egg, or not.
Shannon could not stop thinking about those factors as she went back to the lab, with forty-eight hours to go until she pressed the button. She’d be here the whole way, a couple more news interviews to do but mostly just sitting and staring at the numbers and checking the seals on tanks and generally chewing her fingernails.
As she entered the office, Shannon was struck by a powerful sensation that she could not have both—she would never get pregnant unless she did something to destroy the experiment. She could not create life in her lab tanks and also in her womb.
“Control the miracle”, her team leader had said. Those words rattled around in her head. They had controlled everything for eight months. They had scheduled sex for every day of her fertile window. She had taken pre-natal vitamins for two years before they started. Dale had even quit his dalliances with pot to make sure his sperm count was as high as possible. But still it hadn’t happened.
The scientist in her knew there was no possible connection between her work and her fertility except a psychological one in her own mind. Yet the feeling was so overwhelming that her reason could not deny it.
She began to make her rounds, checking the things she had checked a thousand times before, but now each time she saw herself, in her mind’s eye, disrupting the experiment in some small way that might go unnoticed, or at least be written off as an accident. She could loosen a seal, or introduce some foreign substance, or change a temperature setting, and no one would blame her. Everyone knew how committed she was to the experiment.
And even if disrupting the experiment didn’t cause her to get pregnant, it certainly wouldn’t cause her *not* to become pregnant. And either way, she’d never get to run the control group. She just had this one chance, to make a strong statement of her commitment, to show God or the universe or the great magnet that she wanted a baby so bad she was willing to do something really extreme for it, to strike a flint stone in dry tinder and light a blaze just to find the spark of life.
She realized that her hand was hovering over a computer workstation keyboard. She had keyed in the command that would invisibly lower the temperature inside the secondary containment chamber, a subtle but sure way to spike the experiment and undo five years of effort from dozens of people and a hundred million dollars in funding.
Her fingers began to shake as she realized how close she was, but she did not pull her hand away.
*
“Ladies and Gentleman, before we begin, I will simply remind everyone that we’re here under strict NDA’s, besides which, anyone who shares what is said on this call with anyone who is not on this call will be found out and shunned from this working group. There will be no warnings or exceptions.
“With that said, we are here to discuss the downstream implications for biotech and our economy generally of the ongoing LIFE experiments. If they are successful, we will be on the doorstep of fully patentable, fully exploitable living tissue. The implications are both wide-ranging and massive in scale.
“Immediately, we will see needle-moving improvements in manufacturing and agriculture. Medium- and long-term, this technology will revolutionize the clinical trials process. We’re looking at designer pets, custom species design for biosphere repair, paradigm shifts in artificial organs—well, artificial isn’t the right word anymore, is it?
“And do keep in mind that these are conservative scenarios. If all goes well, in a couple of decades, we’ll be using inert chemicals to generate self-sustaining ecologies aboard humanity’s first starship. But here on Earth, real world, we’re looking at twenty to thirty trillion in value just in the first decade. This technology is going to move the GDP figures for all of the world’s major economies, not to mention buy a few estates on Martha’s Vineyard for people on this call.”
*
Shannon stood there, her outstretched fingers shaking over the button. She imagined she could feel her husband’s sperm swimming up into her uterus, seeking her egg, and that this button would open the door that was keeping them out. She knew she was hallucinating, but she could not bring herself to stop feeling it anyway, as if she was in a lucid dream.
She thought of her sister, who had conceived three children with three different men, two of them one-night stands. She thought of her mother, who had thought herself barren and adopted her two brothers before conceiving her two daughters at ages thirty-four and thirty-six. She wondered what they had given up for those babies. If she did not make this sacrifice, and did not conceive, would she ever forgive herself?
She heard footsteps approaching, and recognized them as her team leader’s steps, his distinctive hard-bottom oxfords clicking against the linoleum of the lab’s floor. She had only moments to press the button or not. Her team leader would be making the rest of her rounds with her, and so if she pressed the button, she would not be able to undo the temperature variance, but if she did not press it, this would be her last chance.
She thought of Dale. He wanted to badly to be a father. She wanted to be a mother, but even more she wanted to give him that gift. The footsteps clicked closer.
*
“This experiment is an abomination! Make no mistake, this is the wickedness of the devil at work! Only GOD can create life, only GOD can offer the spark! From the darkness, light! From the void, form! The fish and the plants and the animals and Man! Adam in the garden and Eve from his rib bone! We know the litany of the creation as we know the power of GOD! That is why we know this wicked ritual will fail! Yes, my brothers and my sisters, I have heard the words of GOD Himself come down from Heaven, and you need have no fear. It is prophesied through me on this day that the tyranny of evil scientists will flip the switch they have created and receive no result.
*
Still Shannon’s hand quivered over the button that would destroy all she had worked for. Another footstep. She thought of her team leader’s face, the anxious smile that would be touching his lips when he entered her workstation.
She thought of all she had done to get to this point. The hours in the lab, the backaches from sitting hunched over books, the schmoozing for funding and the endless grant-writing until the words swam before her eyes. She had done it all so that she could arrive in this moment, where some subtle chemicals were going to mix inside a tank and hopefully create something that had never existed before. She had done it all, in other words, so that she could become a god.
And now it suddenly hit her, that she was on the verge of throwing that away in some vain attempt to bargain with miracles. Her mind could not accept that her efforts might be expended without fruit, and so it was searching for more and more to control, dreaming up deals that were not available.
She withdrew her hand. It no longer shook. The moment had passed. Suddenly she could not believe what she had been about to do. It was simultaneously insane and totally understandable. She knew, in her heart, that her refusal to throw away her work would not prevent her from having a child, but she also knew that there was no control group, and that if she could not conceive, a part of her would always wonder. That was the nature of miracles—they did not come upon the unworthy, who were left to wonder why.
Her team leader rounded the corner, and she met his anxious smile with what she hoped was a confident grin.
“Ready to make sure we control the miracle?” he asked?
“I’ll be happy enough just to witness it,” she said.
They went to make their rounds and check on the experiment, but she knew they weren’t going to find anything amiss. She could still feel, deep in her belly, her husband’s seed, looking for purchase. Nothing to be done there, either. She had done her part. Now it was hers to breathe and hope.
END
Hope you enjoyed! (I obviously have babies on the brain, huh?) Please feel free to like, comment, and share, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun. Have a great week!
I’ve never tried to have a baby, but I relate very much to the desperation of wanting something so badly that you’re tempted to do drastic things to get it.
This is a unique twist on something I think we all do - make connections between events that have no connection. I have always thought of it as a form of praying- if you give me this, I will forgo that.