TWO PENS.(high-technology writing equipment)

Until now, man's relationship with the pen has been relatively straightforward. Few people stopped to wonder whether the "I" who scribbles the "Sorry I backed into your new car" note is separate, in some important ontological way, from the interface of ballpoint and scratch pad. But those carefree days have gone the way of cursive script.

The first sign of change surfaced in December, when it was revealed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had used an Autopen to simulate his signature on official condolence letters. Responding to criticism, he issued a written statement expressing contrition--"I have directed that in the future I sign each letter"--which only made it sound as if the Autopen were still on the job. Then Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, announced that she had invented a device that allows an author to remain at home while autographing books in faraway bookstores--a solution to the perennial problem of highbrow writers being mobbed by screaming fans. Her contraption is a kind of two-way video hookup with a robotic pen arm. An author can sit at the kitchen table in her pajamas and make a personalized inscription on an electronic screen, while, in a distant mall, the robotic pen replicates the message on the title page of a fan's propped-up book. Atwood came up with the idea last spring, during an expensive and exhausting three-week publicity tour for her novel "Oryx and Crake." She says that the invention, which will be manufactured by a new company called Unotchit ("You no touch it"), will increase both the safety of the writer-reader interaction--"My germs and my bio-material won't be in the same place as your germs and your bio-material"--and its profundity: "I'm more likely to be gazing deeply into your eyes as I'm signing on the screen." And she insists that there will be no appreciable lessening of an autograph's authenticity, because writing is already only a distant cousin of thought. "The mind is the device that is thinking out the signature," she said. "The hand is the extension of the mind, and the pen is the extension of the hand--so the pen is at two removes from the author's mind already. This thing is just another remove."

The other day, in a glitzy ceremony at the Time Warner Center, in Columbus Circle, the LeapFrog company introduced another new pen, called FLY, that is so far removed from an author's mind that it actually talks back to it. FLY, which has the shape and heft of ...