Alaska. The Midnight Sun. And a Laptop Running Danny Rosenberg.

Martha had the laptop open on the bunk with the volume low, watching Danny Rosenberg perform the amygdala feather bit to a crowd she couldn't see. Austin was at the small table, going through the manifest again — the third time through — not because he expected to find anything new but because looking at something familiar was better than thinking about Paul in Sitka.

"He's not actually there," Martha said.

Austin looked up. "Who?"

"The comedian. Danny Rosenberg. He's an avatar. A digital person in a suit."

Austin looked at the screen. Danny was mid-bit, explaining the imaginary feather you use to tickle your amygdala, delivering it with the absolute conviction of a man who has never once doubted the material. The audience on the recording was laughing. The audience in Dutch Harbor was Austin, who was not laughing but whose face had shifted slightly toward something less closed off than it had been thirty seconds ago.

Outside, the sun was at that angle it gets in Dutch Harbor in summer — not quite setting, not quite staying, hovering at the edge of the sky like it couldn't make up its mind. The biological clock, Martha thought. The thing you can't ignore. Paul in Sitka making it worse, not better. Austin at the table with his manifests and his jaw set like he was solving a problem he hadn't named yet.

On screen, Danny moved to Card Six. Love Gratitude Joy Inspiration. He said the words with such complete sincerity, such utter seriousness — a digital face expressing genuine emotion it had learned from somewhere — that Martha felt something move in her chest that she hadn't expected to feel in Dutch Harbor, in the middle of an investigation, watching a man who didn't exist perform a comedy show to an audience three thousand miles away.

She looked at Austin.

Austin was already looking at her.

Neither of them said anything. The midnight sun held its position on the horizon, waiting.

Dr. Margaret Chen was not enrolled in the Expander course. She was investigating it.

This distinction mattered to her. She was a neuroscientist. She had publications. She had a reputation. She had a colleague — Dr. James Whitfield, University of Oregon — who had taken the course on a dare and then, six weeks later, published a paper on theta-gamma brainwave patterns that cited the Bee Buzz Breath method. Not approvingly. Confusedly. As in: "The mechanism is unclear, the results are anomalous, and we cannot explain why the subjects who hummed and told themselves jokes showed markedly different patterns than the control group."

Dr. Chen had taken the pamphlet from Whitfield's desk. For Entertainment Purposes Only. Body. Mind. Heart. Spirit.

She'd read it three times on the train home.

She was not going to take the course. She was going to observe. Interview subjects. Document outcomes. Apply the scientific method to a piece of paper she'd found on a colleague's desk that she could not stop thinking about.

Dr. Chen looked at him for a long moment.

"Preliminary observation," she said again.

By week six she had completed the course, filed for IRB approval on a formal study, and was humming Card Four in the elevator every morning. The results, she was already certain, were going to require careful language. Anomalous. Unexpected. Mechanistically unclear.

She felt better than she had in years.

Billy Ray Jenkins — B.R., to everyone who had ever met him — lost Card One on a Tuesday and didn't realize it until Thursday, by which point he had missed two mornings of the Feather, Switch & Dial and his mood had declined in a way he could not account for scientifically but could feel in his shoulders.

He retraced his steps methodically. This was a skill he'd developed, not from detective fiction or police procedurals, but from years of losing things. Keys. Glasses. His first ex-wife's phone number, which he'd never needed but hadn't wanted to lose. The feather card had been in his shirt pocket Monday. His shirt had gone into the wash Tuesday. The dryer was not the place for laminated index cards.

He called the course administrator. Got a replacement card mailed out same day — The Expander worked like that, he'd noticed. Things moved fast when you were in the system.

While he waited, he did Card One from memory. Imaginary feather. Imaginary switch. Imaginary dial. He turned the dial from 4 to 7 and something shifted in his chest, like a key finding a lock it hadn't known was there.

Robert looked at him for a long moment. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Card One," B.R. said. "From memory."

Robert sat down on the other porch chair. He'd been watching B.R. do these things for three weeks and he was going to order the cards himself but he hadn't told B.R. that yet. He was still in the phase of watching to see if it was embarrassing.

It was. He ordered the cards that afternoon anyway.