Rabbit Test

A short story by Samantha Mills

It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to dread the sight of it. She moves, and the overlay moves with her. A reminder. A threat.

There are three other authorized users with access to her rabbit test: her mother, her father, and the family doctor who installed it at their request shortly after her first menses.

In two months, Grace will turn 18 and at that point she can maintain or disable the app as she sees fit. But she doesn’t have two months. Her period is six days late, and tomorrow her tracker will automatically administer a pregnancy test.

Grace pulls up the profile of her best friend, Sal, and sends their usual emergency alert: Coffee??

It is 1931, and Maurice Friedman and Maxwell Edward Lapham have just published “A Simple, Rapid Procedure for the Laboratory Diagnosis of Early Pregnancies” in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, volume 21. This simple (very), rapid (by some standards) procedure involves one urine sample and one very unlucky rabbit.

(It is 1927, and Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondek have just introduced the test first, actually, and theirs involves five-packs of mice. But the doctors, both Jewish, will soon flee Nazi Germany, and except for the occasional lab that prefers breeding mice over rabbits, it is the Friedman test that will catch on instead.)

Step One: Inject the urine sample into the veins of a live, juvenile female rabbit. Wait several days.

Step Two: Dissect the unlucky bunny. Inspect its ovaries. If they have enlarged and turned yellow, then congratulations or our condolences, this follicular maturation indicates a noticeable presence of hCG. You’re pregnant.

Contrary to the parlance of the time, it is not the death of the rabbit that indicates a positive test. The rabbit always dies.

It is 2091, and the fine folks at Rabbit Test LMC do not have a laboratory farm. There are no animal casualties in the work they do. A very small minority of their users even understand the reference that inspired the company’s name—it is a bit of trivia. Ancient history. An office joke.

Grace doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, and certainly isn’t laughing. She waits for Sal at the coffee shop, and every sip of spark makes her stomach roil with nerves.

When Sal gets there—lovely Sal with her long brown hair and her nails painted like dragon scales—Grace can barely wait till they’re in the parking lot to blurt it out.

“How?” Sal cries. “Didn’t you map it, like I said?”

She had, she had, that was the thing. Grace had watched her cycle tracker like a surveillance drone over a labor march, and even though her parents disabled the setting that indicated her most fertile days (“Don’t get any ideas,” they’d said), she’d done the math on paper to map out her most unfertile days. At least, that’s what she thought.

Now Sal is chewing anxiously on one of her nails (she’ll ruin them that way, always does). “Did you tell Mac? Do you think he’ll stick around? Will your parents—”

“I need a blackout,” Grace interrupts. “Please, Sal. I know you’ve got some.”

It’s a glitch they’ve used before. An errant bit of update code that will block their apps for a day or two. Sal uses them to disable her blood alcohol test whenever her parents are out of town. They download patches every time, but she’s a whiz at writing new ones, and that’s all that Grace needs, just a day or two to corrupt the rabbit test. Under cover of the blackout, she can pull up the profile of one of those old ladies who sells pill packs out of their closets, hoarded up from before the ban.

She tries not to think about Mac, or that night spent fumbling in a sleeping bag in his dad’s backyard. He’s leaving for a deep-sea fishing gig in two weeks. He isn’t even waiting for graduation, it’s the old birthday-and-bounce, and everyone knows how few of those boys come back.

Sal is looking panicked—this is leagues beyond getting shitfaced on a Saturday night—but they’re best friends, weekend witches, twins from different sins.

She whispers, “I’ll do it.”

It is 1940, and bioassays are already shifting away from mice and rabbits and on to frogs: Xenopus laevis, to be exact. It’s a brilliant substitution, inspired by the research of Lancelot Hogben in the 1930s.

(The zoologist: British. His place of study: South Africa. Until he became disillusioned by the racism of the region, at which point he left the country behind and took a colony of frogs with him.)

Here is the genius of the development: within twelve hours of injecting the young frog with hormone-laden urine: poof, she lays eggs. Miles quicker than rabbit death row, and check this out: you can use the frog again!

There are obstacles in place (a doctor must decide that early diagnosis is warranted), but even so, tens of thousands of frogs will be exported from southern Africa each year to fill demand.

Read the rest:  Uncanny Magazine

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