“These were breakout and breakaway characters that took on a life of their own,” said Mark Pettit, the MCI public relations man who was handling Gramercy matters. What’s more, the company’s advertising agency, MVBMS, hadn’t just tried to make Gramercy real in the real world; the agency people had also made the characters real in the _video_ world by way of an introductory commercial that looked like a preview of a new fall series. Having conquered TV, then, and with the Internet a main focus of the ad campaign, how could MCI _not_ have opened up a Web area to ballyhoo the same services that Darlene was pushing on the tube? The commercials had whetted interest in the characters. And now MCI would see if it could satisfy this curiosity while also passing on more details about its new line of services. “People wanted more than thirty seconds of information,” Pettit said, “and it can be hard to give them more on TV. What if we turned this into a real place that they could go visit? And that’s how it came to life.” By MCI’s own estimate, more than a million people visited the “real place” in the first six weeks or so. Even Bob Lilienfeld dropped by. He was an MCI stockholder and wanted to keep an open mind despite his skepticism about the mall concept—maybe he could do business with pros like MCI’s. Lilienfeld filled out a form that offered a two-month trial of Net-related services, and waited. I first visited the Gramercy Press around the same time that Lilienfeld did. The site popped up on my screen with color photos of a perky-looking Darlene and friends. I saw a red logo, too. A small “GP” appeared between “Gramercy” and “Press,” a nice little touch that a real publisher might have tried. I wondered what ambitions MCI had. Might it turn the fictitious GP into a commercial publisher someday? The screen said Gramercy was “The World’s First Virtual Publishing House,” and across the top I saw color photos of Darlene and friends, all looking as real as ever. If I’d been impatient for a hard sell, I could have clicked immediately on items such as “networkBusiness” or “MCI Telecommunications, Inc.” But like the rest of the cosmos, I was more keen on reading some virtual gossip from virtual humans. In a primitive way, reminiscent of many a best-seller, a teaser led me on. I learned that the people of Gramercy were “working on secret projects, curt memos, random thoughts, Machiavellian power plays,” and that I might “even browse a clandestine love letter or two about to be sent via e-mail across the corridor.”