I opened the e-mail. Ellen deRosset was complaining that “My office has more manuscripts than the Library of Alexandria—I’m running out of room for me. Could people submit their stories over the Internet instead of through the mail?” Reginald Gales wrote that he’d sent out a fax to computer artists, asking for submissions; and in fact MCI was offering to post the works of electronic artists, not just writers. Under the subject line “Excellent Proposition,” Curtiss Bruno asked: “Hey Darlene, want to come by and check out the romance section of our newest catalog?” Funny. The TV commercials had led me to believe he might be tiring of the chase. Marta Dragelov passed on some funny trivia from a book she was researching. Peter Hoffman announced that he would be out of the office the next week but would be keeping in touch with electronic mail. So, yes, I could read the same e-mail as Darlene could. But that still wasn’t full interactivity. I wanted a two-way, and the “Compose” command intrigued me; perhaps I could e-mail the crew behind the Darlene character. I wrote that I was a real writer, working on a real book, for a real publisher; could they please tell me what kind of responses the people at Gramercy Press were getting over the Internet? _And how about Darlene?_ “What’s she like?” I was thinking. “How’d those people choose her? Does she enjoy computers? Has she been on the Net?” Once I established contact with the virtual Darlene’s keepers, perhaps I could find out. Having already snooped at Darlene’s e-mail, I went on to the offices of the other characters. Ellen deRosset, a dark-haired woman dressed in black, confided that she had corrected her seventh-grade teacher’s grammar. “I read _War and Peace_ when I was fifteen. The complete works of Balzac before I was twenty-five. I think you get the picture. So I am not happy that I was given the assignment to edit this ‘women in sports’ book. I dislike sports rather intensely. The only sport I know anything about, really, is fencing. But one must be flexible these days, and the MCI Business software makes this assignment easier to handle, if not more palatable.” Reginald Gales told me how MCI’s e-mail and conferencing services came in handy. One of his authors lived on a caboose in Wyoming, while another wrote from a houseboat in Florida; “he once had a shark bite off his TV antenna.” Marta Dragelov, the fact checker, was an avid user of MCI’s news-flash service, which crammed her computer with such items as, “India Asks Phone Firms to Set Up Local Factories”—actual news stories that I could see while clicking on them. Peter Hoffman was away at home and working in his pajamas. Martin Banks, the technophobic editor, said he was “being tutored on the wonders of MCI electronic office ephemera by none other than Miss Ellen deRosset.” He hoped that she would notice his new pair of wing tips.