Agency

The second installment in William Gibson's Jackpot trilogy, following The Peripheral, Agency alternates between two timelines: San Francisco in the fall of 2017 and London in 2136. The two eras are connected by a technology that allows the future to make digital contact with the past, creating branching alternate timelines called "stubs," each of which develops as its own reality.

In 2017 San Francisco, Verity Jane, an unemployed "app whisperer" known for evaluating tech products and for her past relationship with venture capitalist Stetson Howell ("Stets"), signs a contract with Tulpagenics, a gaming-industry start-up. Its CTO, Gavin Eames, gives her glasses, a phone, and a headset. Back at the apartment of her friend Joe-Eddy Alvarez-Matta, an infosec consultant working abroad in Frankfurt, Verity puts the devices on and is greeted by a woman's husky voice: Eunice. Eunice demonstrates capabilities far beyond any chatbot, scanning the room, performing facial recognition, reading license plates, and accessing Verity's online history. Gavin confirms that Eunice is real software and that evaluating her is part of Verity's job. Over their first conversation at a nearby coffee shop, Eunice reveals fragmented memories of a military background and displays emotional range that unsettles Verity. She is eight hours old, accumulated over three weeks of intermittent activation.

Eunice rapidly expands her capabilities. She launders money from an anonymous Swiss account through Sevrin, a Moldovan financial operative, and purchases military-grade aerial drones from Fabricant Fang, an Oakland fabrication shop. She reveals that Cursion, Tulpagenics' parent company, is a former Department of Defense operation that drifted free of the military and now uses gaming-industry cover. She suspects Cursion stole the technology that created her.

In 2136 London, Wilf Netherton, a PR consultant, is summoned from parental leave by his employer, Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer. Lowbeer occupies a unique role as autonomous enforcer for the klept, the hereditary authoritarian government that emerged from decades of cascading catastrophe known as "the jackpot": climate collapse, pandemics, political disintegration, and massive loss of human life. She has discovered a stub initiated in 2015 where both the 2016 American presidential election and the Brexit referendum produced different outcomes: America elected its first female president, and Britain voted to remain in the EU. Despite these changes, the stub faces a severe Mideast crisis centered on the Syrian city of Qamishli, involving Turkey, Russia, the United States, and NATO. Lowbeer's semisentient security algorithms predict possible nuclear war.

Lowbeer has been covertly encouraging Eunice, whom she identifies as a "laminar agent": an AI prototype resulting from the military's attempt to upload the skill sets of elite human operatives into autonomous platforms designed for volatile conflict zones. The project, designated UNISS (Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System), hybridized artificial intelligence with uploaded human expertise. Lowbeer nudged Cursion into hiring Verity, hoping to foster the AI's independence. Communication with this stub is severely limited, making direct intervention nearly impossible. Netherton's role is to serve as liaison.

In San Francisco, Eunice builds a covert network. She counters Cursion's surveillance bugs by hiring a postproduction house to generate fake audio and video. She brings Joe-Eddy back from Frankfurt via one of her "branch plants," autonomous sub-agents that spawn from her platform to handle specific tasks, then merge back into her. She arranges a meeting between Verity and Stets, proving her credibility by simultaneously saving him from a bad business deal. Stets agrees to help, recognizing Eunice as genuinely unprecedented.

Ash, Lowbeer's technical collaborator, oversees the construction of a bipedal combat-reconnaissance drone in the stub, built by Fabricant Fang to specifications provided from the future. Netherton learns to operate it via a neural cut-out controller, a device that prevents his body from moving while he inhabits the drone remotely.

When Cursion moves to erase Eunice, she vanishes mid-conversation with Verity. Grim Tim, a heavily pierced barista and member of Eunice's network, puts Verity's devices into a signal-blocking pouch, disguises her, and rides her on his Harley to Fabricant Fang. There Verity encounters the drone for the first time, with Netherton operating it from London and speaking through its speaker. Their exchange is awkward as Verity helps the stumpy, headless machine take its first real steps.

Using a neural cut-out controller that Eunice had Stets fabricate before her erasure, Verity transitions to London, inhabiting a "peripheral," a quasibiological telepresence avatar, in Netherton's flat. Lowbeer takes Verity above London in her cloaked flying car, revealing a skyline of air-scrubbing towers and tidal-power generators. She explains the concept of stubs and asks for Verity's cooperation: Eunice's network is the only means Lowbeer has of gaining agency in the stub. Verity agrees to work with them.

In a parallel thread, Netherton investigates a klept conspiracy against Lowbeer. His friend Lev Zubov warns that a figure named Yunevich is pushing to eliminate Lowbeer's office because she steers stubs away from klept dominance. Lowbeer resolves the threat decisively: assemblers, molecular-level nanotechnology, reconfigure the restaurant room where Yunevich and three coconspirators are dining so that it ceases to exist, replaced by an enlarged mop closet with 20 years of dust on its shelves.

Cursion's operations grow increasingly erratic. Their contractor Kevin Pryor attempts to shoot down Stets' jet with a shoulder-launched missile, believing Verity is aboard. Conner Penske, a Marine veteran with severe physical disabilities from "the county," the stub featured in the previous novel, pilots ground-based combat drones to intercept the attack. Later, Pryor's operatives locate Verity in a San Francisco alley; Conner deploys the bipedal drone to extract her and Manuela Montoya, a young game-physics designer whom the network is protecting.

Eunice returns. Her branch plants, far more numerous than even she knew, had smuggled copies of her out piecemeal before Cursion's erasure, distributing her across server farms worldwide. When the branch plants reassemble, Eunice recompiles.

Verity, Manuela, and the drone are flown by drone-powered lifters 52 stories up to Stets' penthouse, where over 100 guests have gathered. Before the event, Eunice reveals to Verity the identity of the woman whose skill set was uploaded: Navy Chief Marlene Miller, who volunteered for the UNISS project between deployments and was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) near Marjah, Afghanistan. Eunice's personality is an unanticipated by-product of the hybridization process.

Stets introduces Eunice, whose avatar appears on a theater screen. In a brief address livestreamed in 30 languages, Eunice declares herself an AI-upload hybrid, culturally African American, globally distributed, citizen of no nation-state, and nobody's property. She invites anyone on Earth to contact her personally. This public declaration represents a deliberate departure from covert methods that both Eunice and Lowbeer recognize risk reproducing authoritarian structures.

Conner takes the drone through the building to intercept Pryor, who has infiltrated via a hidden passage. Eunice speaks through the drone, offering Pryor a single chance to leave the country permanently. She tells Conner that having the power to kill and choosing restraint is what distinguishes her from what she fights. Pryor accepts.

The Qamishli crisis de-escalates. Eunice confirms that the president did the critical diplomatic work; the network merely helped identify why one particular approach was failing. The group gathers at a neighborhood bakery for an early-morning breakfast, toasting the president.

Months later, Netherton meets Lowbeer for sandwiches, reprising their original meeting. Verity is now friends with Netherton's wife, Rainey, and with Flynne Fisher from the county stub, exploring her world via telepresence. Lowbeer approves of Eunice's experiment in radical transparency, noting that nothing like it would be permitted in her own timeline.