Kyle’s Reviews > Agency > Status Update

She’s back, or is it they and have they always been around, just not as the snarky AI interface Verity knows as Eunice? Do I need to start making a flow chart for new and half-forgotten characters ie, Manuela, Bevan, Ainsley and Carsyn, as Eunice suggested earlier with her Inception infographic? The future team seems to be put on hold while Plot A kicks into its heist-like conclusion, so what’s the take?

Shifting alliances across mulltiple timelines: Verity finds out her tormentor has a name, Pryor, who might only be one of the many agents gathering around the long table that Eunice would have been at the head of; Conner, meanwhile, seems to be preoccupied with White House shenanigans to leave Verity and Grim Tim to their own devices (Peripheral 3?) while Wilf has got himself entangled in a Dostoevsky novel.

The separate paths each group is now on will hopefully connect in some way that is cohesively satisfying: I mean, preventing nuclear annihilation of a timeline is okay, but narratively a given. Bringing back a long-gone AI system with at least some personality can’t happen too soon, despite detours to London’s retro-cosplay area and endless ride in a van. Interesting to hear more about the centuries-long jackpot.

Taking more than a page or two from the Inception screenplay, Verity and Wilf jump from one reality to another, making it hard to tell to whose subjective point of view each chapter belongs. The nefarious yet-to-be-seen antagonist Cursion operates through a system of projections with a spying app called Followr that can also be accessed by Lowbeer in her timeline, making Wilf, Rainey, Conner and Ash futurrs.

The multidimensional conversation begins, with Wilf assisted by Ash, meanwhile Verity seems surprisingly calm about the whole situation, still probably recovering from the motorcycle ride with her uppity barista, hired on by the laminae filling the gap that Eunice left in Verity’s life. She will be less shocked to learn she is in a stub than a dawning realization how much of her world is determined by these agents.

Closer to where storylines will converge, Netherton suits up in an anthropomorphic drone to reach Verity’s stub, crossing the temporal threshold. Just before Eunice executes her escape and eventual Gandalf-like return, she and Verity share a moment staring at a mural that depicts Hillary’s victory over a grabby menace, a mere shadow of what might have been for them but a serious systems error for us in this stub.

The present timeline is starting to coalesce into the experience most readers have with this kind of sci-fi, where an intelligent system rattles off vaguely understandable possibilities while the human operator (or reader) does what one can to keep up. In the distant future, I am doing what I can to recall the many Peripheral characters that Wilf interacts with, and I only had read that book three years ago.

Ping-ponging again between different timelines: a chapter here for Verity, next one catches up with Wilf, and repeat. The future has moved on little from The Peripheral but it is the exploration of the recent past in an alternate Russian hacker-less political landscape that is really appealing as an escape from our scary non-novel reality. Eunice is a piece of work with future foreshadowing spinning her web.