Joe Messenger is an award-winning specialist in artificial intelligence. The son of a cryonics pioneer, he believes that people can be made to live forever. But he also knows that merely freezing the body is not enough; without one's brain - one's consciousness - a cryonically preserved person will be incomplete. Joe, a computer genius, devises a way to download the human brain into a supercomputer called ARCHIVE. Joe's wife, Karen, finds his cutting-edge research increasingly disturbing, particularly his obsessive work on ARCHIVE, which is developing signs of a distinct and sinister personality. Karen's complaint that ARCHIVE is beginning to dominate their lives is not idle paranoia - it is truer than even she realizes. Karen and Joe's marriage is further threatened when he falls for Juliet Spring, a gifted young scientist whose loveliness is matched by her keen insight into Joe's work. But just as the pair are on the brink of a scientific breakthrough, a series of macabre accidents befall Joe, Karen, and their son, Jack - clearly the work of some malevolent force. It becomes increasingly evident that the obsessions that have shaped Joe's life are about to blow his family apart.

During a congress about artificial intelligence the successful psychoanalyst George Wilson falls in love with an extraordinary woman. Although he has a love affair with her, he only discovers her secret several years later when they meet at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. This story is set at a time in the future when computers become more and more like humans and humans more and more like computers. The "thinking computers" go on strike, demand the same rights as humans, fight discrimination, adopt a constitution and are eventually fully recognized as citizens. In its enlightened and humane rationality the utopia of a better world takes shape, in which the weaknesses of human foolishness are overcome. But the computers not only think, they also feel, love and suffer. One of them even becomes schizophrenic and is treated psychoanalytically - with success. Following the novel 'The Mini Atom Project' physicist Richard M. Weiner reflects in his playfully witty, sometimes satirical fantasy about a future that has already moved quite close to the present, about the anthropological boundaries between man and machine, and at the same time those between humans and animals, the familiar and the foreign, nature and culture, life and death - and about happiness.