His name is Nicolas Angstrom. He’s specialized in photocopiers. He’s small and flat, with no social life. A small cog who finds peace in a minimal life, entirely absorbed in repairing machines. He likes the expected (the Parisian Metro map fascinates him), things animated by ties of causality that hold no surprises and are put into play by the laws of mechanics. Angstrom has a past that is hard to bear, made of abandonment, and a family secret that he’d rather bury, but whose guilt he takes on. One fine day in this well-ordered life, Angstrom gets laid off. The company he has been working for for years has been bought out by another company, in India. That’s how the clockwork world works, and Angstrom is suddenly on the sidelines.
Isolated and anxiety-stricken, having lost his bearings, Angstrom meets Gabriel, not your ordinary bum, who offers him a job. Member of a strange Organization, Gabriel watches over everyone, offering people a reason to live so that they exude their sensibility. For the clockwork world offers no perspectives beyond its own continuation. It goes around and around like a merry-go-round. Above it, there’s nothing but frozen infinity. So as not to wither away, since humans need to believe in something, Angstrom becomes a mechanic for souls specialized in charitable work: recreational grief sessions. At first, Angstrom delights in his new role. But via his own painful personal history that comes to the surface and that he frees himself from, he gradually discovers the flip side…