“It’s well past its sell-by date,” he complains over his morning coffee. “I mean, it’s embarrassing! They may be valuable cultural artifacts from the 1970s but there’s no AM radio network to plug those sixteen rpm record players into anymore. The posters . . . no. And don’t get me started on the pamphlet! It’s straight out of the Jack Chick school of government communications—if I showed up at synod with a scheme to get bums on pews that relied on that type of paternalist nanny-knows-best approach, I’d, well, I’d be taken aside for tea, biscuits, and a serious talking-to about the history of marketing communications since the Mad Men era.”

“Well fine,” I say, interrupting him in full flow. “Can you write a report explaining what’s wrong with it? Main conclusions on the first page, plus supplementary stuff and footnotes?”

“Um, I don’t see why not! Why?”

“Because it’d be a good starting point.” I take a sip of my coffee: it’s still too hot to drink, and I burn the roof of my mouth. “Do that first, then we can sit down and brainstorm what a public education campaign ought to look like in the era of WikiLeaks and Reddit. Oh, and Arsebook for the unwashed masses.” (Like most other Laundry employees, I shun Facebook: their wheedling attempts to encourage personal disclosure are, shall we say, inimical to the core values of this organization.) “Stuff like, oh, adding ‘how to tell if your neighbors are zombies’ to the NHS Direct website, how to improvise a field-expedient basilisk gun from a pair of webcams, and so on. Disguised as background material for a role-playing game in case it leaks prematurely and we need plausible deniability—”

The phone rings. It’s Dr. Wills, and she’s very unhappy.

Unhappy?

No, she’s livid.

“Mr. Howard!” she snaps. “I don’t know what you’re bloody playing with over there but I’ve just spent the past twelve hours digging through medical records and if this is your fault it’s a disaster, and if it isn’t your fault we’ve got a major-incident grade emergency on our hands—”

“Wait,” I choke out, “we’re talking about the, the report I brought round yesterday?”

“What else would we be talking about?”