It was a joke, really. A trial. A test run. That’s how it had started.

The story began three weeks ago, when her advisor, the gruff and brilliant Dr. Mbeki, had pulled her aside. “Alena, your qualitative data is poetry. But the funding board speaks prose. They want a p-value. They want a significant interaction. Give them a story they can graph.”

She clicked Analyze > Regression > Binary Logistic . She moved the variables into the boxes. Her finger hovered over the OK button. But something stopped her. A text file was open on her second monitor: Field_Notes_089_Carol.txt .