Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it.

Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, and he finds a new job: beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. It seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He’s supposed to get in their way and edge them back. He’s offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn’t what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it could also be murder.

Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as much in demand for his cutting-edge observations on the world we live in now. Originally printed in publications as varied as Wired, the New York Times and the Observer, these articles and essays cover 30 years of thoughtful, observant life, and are reported in the wry, humane voice that lovers of Gibson have come to crave.

Case is a burnt-out hacker living in the Spawl, the bloated urban mass of what used to be the eastern seaboard of the United States. A past job gone wrong damaged his nervous system and removed his ability to "jack in" to cyberspace and he's circling the drain faster and faster every day. Then a strange woman named Molly tracks him down and says her boss can fix him --- if he helps them with one last job.