It’s the near future: Day and night, programmers are working on the artificial super-intelligence Dave in a claustrophobic living and working project. Dave is meant to bring about a change for the better for the ailing humankind.

The 28-year-old computer nerd Syz receives an unexpected promotion and enters the institute’s inner circle. There, he finds out that the team around Professor Fröhlich has come up against a problem: Without a personality, Dave is unable to recognise himself – which means that he can’t operate proactively. Syz is expected to provide the solution by supplying his own memories as a model for Dave in so-called copying sessions.

But the more the copying procedure progresses and the more Syz finds out about the lab’s operating principles, the more he not only doubts the technology but even loses his sense of reality. Are all these memories even his own anymore? His friends and colleagues slip away from him; the entire lab appears to be engulfed in a strange kind of fog. And then there is Kathun, a young doctor who occupies his thoughts and whom he wants to find in the place’s labyrinthine corridors.

Dave addresses the connection between memory and space, between body and machine. Are computers becoming more human or are people slowly turning into computers? How can we even tell people and bots apart? And what is more menacing: evil machines or evil people?

Raphaela Edelbauer’s highly topical novel finds many-faceted ways of looking at debates on artificial intelligence, faith in technology and surveillance in our digital present.