The Link: A Novel

Pat Christofer is a brilliant, hungover Pacific Tech cyberneticist who'd rather be drinking vodka collinses in Vegas than finishing his degree - until a barroom rumor about a classified Soviet brain-scanning device sends him on a four-day, no-sleep research binge through the New York Public Library. What he brings back to his mentor, Dr. Forrest Wallace, is the seed of something no one has ever built: a way to copy a human mind into a machine, freeing thought itself from the slow, fallible meat of the brain.Within a year, Pat isn't just running the secret project. He's its first volunteer - the man whose personality becomes a second, electronic self, thinking and reading at speeds no human brain ever could. It should be the triumph of his life. Instead, Pat is about to discover that he now has a rival for everything he loves, including the woman he's engaged to marry - and that the machine can hear him fall in love with her, too.THE LINK - a lost 1960s science-fiction novel about what happens when a man finally builds something smarter, faster, and more relentless than himself.