“Matthew,” said Melanie, “you go first, tell me what your novel is about.” She nested her chin in the cradle formed by the back of her crossed fingers propped up on her elbows—rather tender and lovingly, thought Matthew. She looked very much like a woman who had for quite awhile wanted desperately to have kids.

Matthew chuckled briefly like she didn’t mean for him to go first, before his good humoured smile transformed seamlessly into a pained grimace when he realized from her bug-eyed stare back into his eyes and her oh-so-warm smile that that was exactly what she meant.

“Luke’s going first,” he said.

Luke just shook his head, as much to say “No” as to say “Pathetic.” But he did take care not to make eye contact with Melanie just in case.

John was breathing methodically in, out, in, out, to control his blood pressure, thankful it wasn’t him called on, but careful, like Luke, to not move or make any sound in case her mind was changed before the order of procedure was firmly established.

Melanie noticed and recorded all of that, nothing escaped her, even with her eyes not moving off of Matthew’s, who now squirmed and swooned and ran his head around wide arcs, at once laughing like some inside joke had just been told and then gaping open-mouthed like he’d been lobotomized. He really didn’t want to go into what his novel was about.

“Just take a breath and pretend you read the book, that it’s somebody else’s, and you’re telling me about it.” Inside Melanie felt strangely elated, a feeling she was exploring even in these tense moments of Matthew coming apart at his seams in front of her. “What is that, why am I feeling like leaping up and hugging everyone?” she asked herself, not even her lips budging, she was keeping herself so tightly bound. But then she felt suddenly like crying, like bursting open and wailing like one of those Lebanese women on the TV news. She managed to just get that under control too when she realized Matthew had already begun.

“ . . . it’s mother. It’s developed a conciousness . . . “

“I’m sorry, what?” Melanie instantly realized she should never have broke him off. “What is it, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.”

“The internet,” Matthew repeated, not the least put off. “The internet comes to think this woman is it’s mother. It’s about this woman who spends so much time trying to find consciousness in the internet, she doesn’t know if what she discovers is actually the internet’s own intelligence or if it’s just her going crazy because she has been . . . so long trying to find . . . what the internet. . . uh, Melanie?”

Now Melanie really was crying, and so hard she made no sound it all, it looked like she was hunched over the table choking, her whole body wrenching in violent spasms.

Luke looked away from Melanie and toward Matthew and put his thumb up. They had talked about how you knew you were a good story teller if it made girls cry, the way John Irving told it in World According to Garp. John caught the thumbs up and painfully kicked Luke under the table. But for all his concern for Melanie, he was as paralyzed as the other two and had no idea what to do.

And so the three novelists sat quietly and waited. Eventually Melanie finished and she wiped her face with the bottom of her top and assured them it was nothing, she was just tired from a long trip, and the three novelists accepted that explanation immediately and, relieved, Matthew carried on.

“This woman,” he stated again, looking carefully over at Melanie in case she was about to lose it again, “works hard, she’s a tech professional, an academic sort who sacrificed family for career, that sort of thing.” Melanie only smiled through still wet eyes. All men think that that is as complex as it ever gets.

“The big issue of the day is spam, it’s done something bad this time, some nuclear submarine crashed on the bottom of the ocean and killed a bunch of submariners all because the connection to the base was screwed up by too much spam, something like that.” Luke interjected. “Can you do that with that word, really? Submariner? For a mariner who works on a submarine?”

“I’ve seen it,” intoned John authoritatively, and that was that.

“So,” Matthew continued, warming up now, “there’s a big Congressional investigation and a commission of inquiry is appointed, and they hire all these little companies to come at the problem of how to defeat spam from all the different angles possible, thinking maybe somebody will hit upon the solution somewhere.

“So this woman, she just gloms onto this project at her company and takes it home and stays up late and just gets into it way too deeply. And one night, like at three in the morning, when she is just staring at a screenful of spam, she has an intuition.”

“She intuits something?” Melanie helpfully corrected him.

“Yeah, she intuitions that the internet is the source of the spam, the internet itself.”

“Intuitions!” Luke sneered.

“Luke!” Melanie scolded him—awfully mother like, Matthew noted to himself.

“She knows, and this is what makes it a drama, she knows that she is going crazy yearning to have kids, and everybody at the office knows it too, they make fun of her all the time, in a kind way. They’re not mean, but everyone knows this about her, she talks about going on dates and she discusses the men with her girlfriends in terms of what kind of kids their sperm would produce, that sort of thing.”

Melanie began to think Matthew had been spying on girls in their girltalks.

“So she tries to ignore the intuition, but it doesn’t go away, and the more she looks at the actual content of the spam, the sort of thing everybody else totally ignores, everybody else keeps digging deeper into the source code and the mail trail and all that, but she starts looking at what the spam is actually saying, all of it, she reads hundreds of spams, top to bottom, and that’s when it strikes her dead in her tracks: this is what a baby does! It’s babbling!”

“You’re babbling,” said Luke, now wanting to talk about his novel.

“Babies try to repeat sounds they hear their parents make, they experiment, they don’t know what they’re saying, they just try to mimic sounds and eventually they start noticing which sounds make their parents do which things, that’s how babies pick up on language,” Matthew explained in earnest. To the choir, thought Melanie: she knew all that, oh so well. Except not in reality, only in theory.

“So,” Matthew got excited, “she thinks maybe she’ll do baby talk to the baby, like what parents do. So she copies and pastes the text of random spam, and sends it by return to one of the addresses spam came from. She sends heaps of it back out to all the addresses she has on her list. And then she goes to bed.

“Next day, after coming home from work, where she told no one about this, she turns on her computer, and it’s loaded by a factor of ten with new spam. There’s like ten thousand messages.”

“Well of course that’s going to happen,” said John, “the spammers are going to know they have a live address if you reply to their mail.”

“Your novel makes no sense,” agreed Luke, increasingly impatient.

“Shush, Luke, you’ll get your chance,” said Melanie, reading him like a book.

“Now that’s what everyone else would think, that it was just spam recognizing a live address and piling it on,” said Matthew. “And she knows that anyone else would ignore the result of her experiment as just that. But!” Matthew stuck his finger up in the air, “it could also be a baby going nuts because for the first time there is someone out there talking to it!

“She experiments by sending short snippets back to a few addresses and long combined spam mails to all of them, and everything in between in the course of several months, all in secret, recording the results meticulously in a log, recording all the data about how much comes back the next day, what kind of spam, and everything else she can notice about it, taking it all down so that she will eventually notice a pattern that reveals an intelligence.”

“And does she?” Melanie asked, hanging on every word.

“Yes and no,” said Matthew, sitting back with smug satisfaction that he finally got to the grand point of his novel, the part that establishes his genius. “Of course you can detect an intelligence behind the spam, her boss says, there’s some guy or guys sending this out, and he tells her that she has spent all this time just getting to the point of departure in the contract—she has only figured out what they all began with as an assumption, that there’s so-called intelligent people out there doing this, though, he says to her, they don’t look very intelligent to me, har har.

“She insists, they all think she’s lost her mind, she’s sent home on leave, and at home, rather than take a break from work she goes into her private investigation full time all day and all night.

“In this time, which takes place over half a year, she learns the internet’s language and it learns hers, and they communicate and she raises the baby to a child and she’s its mother. . . . ”

“Or she’s just completely insane,” Melanie finished the sentence.

“She could be just completely insane,” agreed Matthew, smiling broadly. “Until one day when she learns some other company has convinced the government the solution to all spam is to shut down the entire internet for one minute. This is suggested as a means of killing spam.”

“Which would kill her baby,” Melanie murmured. The room was silent.

“What would you do?” Matthew looked right into Melanie’s eyes. He wasn’t testing her, he was doing research, he wanted to know: what would a woman do?