This is a sequel to The Peripheral, and continues the characters of Wilf Netherton and his wife Rainey, as well as introducing the new characters of Verity Jane and AI entity Eunice (UNISS).

For those who've lost track (easy to do), Wilf and Rainey live in a future similar to what ours may be, where Trump won the election, a combination of ecological and political disasters created a massive global population drop ("The Jackpot") which mostly only the super rich oligarchy survived (aka "the Klept"), and they've discovered some kind of technology that allows them to make contact with alternate universes in the past ("stubs").

In this book we meet Verity Jane, who lives in an alternate stub in which Hilary Clinton won (she's never referred to by name but is clearly Clinton) and in which she's hired to test a brand new AI of mysterious origin called Eunice. Somehow Wilf and Rainey know that nuclear disaster lurks in the future of Verity's timeline and that Eunice is the key to preventing it, and the whole book is rather confusingly about Verity getting to know Eunice and Wilf and Rainey helping her escape from people trying to catch her and/or Eunice for reasons that are still unclear to me (what do Wilf and Rainey get out of all this altruism in other pasts that don't even exist for them?)

Much as I admire Gibson's ability to predict elements of the future (and examples of his foresightedness are many), I'm afraid his actual novels are getting less and less interesting to read as there is less and less interesting plot and more just narrative while explaining theoretical points of technology or futurism. There are some cool things in this book but the plot is frankly just watching Verity running around while trusting Eunice and Wilf etc (for no good reason), and watching Eunice be ridiculously powerful and influential while being totally benevolent and friendly (also for no good reason) and so many questions are raised that are never even addressed. I'll still read any book Gibson writes, but this one was quite a struggle to get through.