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THE GOONS ESCORT ME BACK TO THE PADDED-CELL luxuries of the yacht. I’m trying not to punch the air and shout “Yes!” at the top of my voice: it’s bad form to gloat. So I let them shut me in and look appropriately chastened until they go away again.

I chucked the tux jacket in the closet this morning. Now I rifle through the pockets quickly until I find the business card Kitty gave me. Yes, it is scratch ’n’ sniff on steroids: about five tiny compartments full of Pale Grace™ mascara, eye shadow, foundation, and other stuff I don’t recognize. There’s even a teensy brush recessed into one side of it, like the knife on a Swiss Card. Humming tunelessly I pull out the brush and quickly sketch out a diagram on the bathroom mirror—a reversed image of the one I sketched in the sand around the towel. With any luck it’ll damp down any access they’ve got to the cabin until they wise up and come to look in on me in person. Then I take a deep breath and imagine myself punching the air and shouting “Yes!” by way of relief. (Better safe than sorry.)

Let me draw you a diagram:

Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to . . . well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let’s call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it’s possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it’s possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.

Eileen Billington’s intelligence-gathering back end relies on a classic contagion network. The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn’t just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors. When you apply a contagion field to any kind of information storage system, you make it possible to suck the data out via any other point in the contagion field. Eileen is already running a contagion field—it’s the root of her surveillance system. I’ve got a PC on my desk that isn’t connected to the ship’s network, but I’ve just stuffed a clone of its brain into a machine that is on that network—so all I need to do is contaminate my own box with Pale Grace™, and then . . .

Well, it’s not as easy as all that. In fact, at first I’m shit-scared that I’ve broken the TV (I’m pretty sure the warranty specifically excludes damage due to the USB ports being full of mascara) but then I figure out a better way. Tracing the Fallworth graph on the bathroom mirror backwards with a Bluetooth pen hooked into the television is not the recommended way of establishing a similarity link with a network you’re trying to break into—it’s not even the second worst way of doing so—but it just happens to be the only one I’ve got available to me, so I use it. Once I’ve brought up the virtual interface I poke around until I find the VPN port that the USB dongle I planted in Eileen’s server farm is running. The keystroke logger is happily snarfing login accounts, and I figure out pretty rapidly that Eileen’s INFOSEC people aren’t paranoid enough—they figure that for systems aboard a goddamn destroyer, who needs to go to the bother of biometrics or a challenge/response system like S/Key? They want something they can get into fast and reliably, so they’re using passwords, and my dongle’s captured six different accounts already. I rub my knuckles and go poking around the server farm to see what they’re doing with it. Give me a bottle of Mountain Dew, an MP3 player hammering out something by VNV Nation, and a crate of