'Atico' opens with IT programmer Eduard feeling euphoric after he's fired from his job, because now at last he can shut himself up in his top-floor apartment in Barcelona's old city to programme an ambitious virtual game (which will be a world-wide success). The game consists of 5 screens, each of which is an apartment inhabited by an individual who must be seduced in order to get to the next screen, and must be completed in a limited time. These fictional characters have stockpiled the best dialogues from world literature, so that Atico - the name of the game - is a physical and intellectual challenge. Eduard starts to confuse his reality with that of his virtual characters, with whom he shares love, solitude and fantasies, the core of this novel that also deals with Barcelona, man and global politics, horses, and Delacroix. Atico is truly avant-garde literature.