The Experiment

The charade of professional non-attachment continued. She was still It, in reports, still 'the specimen', still 'the female.' And when the deliverance came, wafting into the enclosure through concealed ventilators, not one of them would blink a tear, or grimace in horror. Her final eulogy, each scientist fully expected, would be the determined scratching of HB pencils on rough note paper.

The Night Before, and final tests were set to run overnight as each individual wearily and forlornly traveled to their homes, leaving Varla alone to take the night shift.

Others had offered, but his devotion - some even muttered obsession - to the project promised him privileges. They left him sitting in his rotating leather-backed chair, gazing vaguely into the enclosure.

And the final morning came.

When the morning shift officially began, the duty biologists entered the main viewing chamber and found Varla's seat empty. They found the enclosure empty.

They found the main enclosure portal wide open.

Security investigators arrived.

They found evidence of non-sanctioned entry into the enclosure on no less than sixteen occasions, over the past ten weeks, usually at night. The records were clumsily concealed within official material accessible only by the three top-ranking team members.

They found medical equipment and the remains of packaged food buried in the loose soil within the cave.

Varla's home was searched.

His wardrobes were empty.

His car was gone.

His bank accounts were cleared out (from an overseas branch).

The receipt for two plane tickets to South America was found in the wastepaper basket in the corner of his home office.

The team met one final time in the facility. Bereft of their leader, and half-aware of the suspicions harbored by the investigators, their congregation was bemused, silent, unsure of what to say. Tomorrow the team would be dissolved, sent separate ways to apply their specialist skills on other projects.

Less unusual, undoubtedly. More conventional, probably.

As the labs were being closed for the last time, a behavioral psychologist happened to elbow a small control on a large and expensive work console. The test results from that final set of procedures, executed the night before the specimen's scheduled destruction, appeared upon the monitor. The team, startled from their private reveries by the brightness of the screen, turned to stare at the un-reviewed data.

Someone's jaw dropped.

The ultra-sensitive detectors in the enclosure showed their audio findings as a band of visual static.

The specimen's steady heartbeat was a regular pattern, like a chain. Varla's unannounced arrival and departure was a burst of furious activity after which all was silent in the enclosure, the specimen having also left.

But there, alongside the visual representation of Her beating heart, the steady strobe of thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud, was another pattern. Similar, but quicker. And fainter. Like an echo.

Like another, smaller organism.....

Like, remarked a leading biologist, the first detected heartbeat of a, say, two-month old embryo, developing within its mother.