Could It Be?
A Writer's Digest February Flash Fiction Challenge Response
Prompt: write about a creation
Ludwiga couldn’t believe her eyes. What she was seeing was impossible. Or was it?
She checked the chemical analysis again. Yes! Confirmed. Definitely a lower number of the abnormal cells. About 20%.
Put the petri dish in the special scanner, the one like the CT contraption used on people, but miniaturized for lab use. OMG, yes again! The results were the same. Twenty percent.
What had she done differently? She triple checked all the standard procedures, but none of them yielded a clue. Puzzled, she sat staring at the plethora of samples and arrangement of equipment at her station on the lab bench. Had someone added a different solution to the samples and not recorded it? Surely not. Not even the research interns would be that careless.
It was a Sunday and she had only come in to pick up the iPod she’d left plugged into the mini speaker on the shelf over her station. But with these findings, she wanted to set up another dish to see if the results could somehow be replicated. Glad she was alone in the lab, she turned up the music that had been left playing. Who would have done that? Probably the janitor.
Pah pah pah bomb, pah pah pah bomb, the Symphony of Fate rang out. The strong clear tones of her 7th great grand-uncle’s Fifth always went through her nervous system like a warrior battling mythic demons. It energized her. Propelled her to overcome the toughest challenges.
It took an hour to set up the petri dishes like before. Then, with nothing more to be done, Ludwiga unplugged the iPod and left the lab. She would check the dishes when she came back on Tuesday.
In those 36 hours, the cancer cells in the dishes had grown as expected. Pondering the disappointing result, Ludwiga noticed a headache forming over her eyes from another researcher’s music. Disharmonies of modern hard rock music always made it hard for her to think, but this time one impossible idea pushed at her brain. It couldn’t be, could it? “Turn that off for a while,” she directed her subordinate. “I have an idea that must be tested.”
Several hours later, the abnormal cell development she was tracking had not only stopped growing, but had also reduced by 20% from the levels of the morning’s results.
It would take a lot more replication to be certain, but Ludwiga gave silent thanks to her ancestor. His brilliance just may yield another breakthrough in cancer research.
For real, science is now researching Beethoven’s Fifth symphony on its significant reduction of cancer cells in lab settings. Histotripsy – a procedure using sound waves – is a relatively new, non-invasive technology treatment that destroys malignant liver tumors, although without the symphonic component.