The closet is small and cold and loud. Fluorescent lights flick on as you walk in. The room is filled with floor to ceiling racks of computers, routers, and switches, which are covered with flickering green and orange LEDs. Huge bundles of neatly organized colored cable run in every possible direction. An industrial air conditioner is blowing into the room at a temperature that would make an eskimo uncomfortable, and about a thousand small fans in the various routers and servers are producing enough white noise that you'd have to yell to talk to someone standing directly in front of you.

This room connects every single electronic device on the ship to all the other electronic devices on the ship. The toaster in the ship's galley can have a full on conversation with the mini-fridge in the captain's quarters. You wonder what a toaster and a fridge would talk to each other about now that someone has spent a fortune building an infrastructure that allows them to do it. "Burn any toast today?" "Very funny. You know I can smell the milk spoiling in your belly from all the way over here. I wonder when the Captain plans on cleaning you." Seems like a lot of expense for something so trite.

There is a protocol analyzer on the floor. Its screen has been smashed and someone has scribbled "Cypherpunks write code!" on its control panel with a red marker. The analyzer is plugged into a printer. There are some printouts on the printer. They appear to be logs of SMTP sessions.

The subject of the first email is "Manifest."
The subject of the second email is "Streaming Audio and the law."

Read "Manifest."
Read "Streaming Audio and the law."
Go back into the hallway.