Verity Jane, a talented App Tamer, takes on beta testing a new product. It's a digital assistant that can be accessed through a regular-looking pair of glasses. The disarmingly human AI in glasses - or, as she calls herself: Eunice - puts together a face, a fragmented past, and cunningly applies military strategies. When Verity realizes that her mysterious new employers don't yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice really is, she instinctively decides to keep them in the dark.

Meanwhile, a century later in London, on a completely different timeline, Wilf Netherton works among the survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as The Jackpot. His boss, the legendary Ainsley Lowbeer, is able to look into alternate pasts and steer them in a different direction than the one they're going. His current project is about Verity and Eunice. Wilf knows what Verity and Eunice don't: the jackpot in their world is on the horizon, and they're both destined for a big role.

William Gibson's science fiction crime thriller is inspired by the events of today, but it takes place in an alternative world where, for example, Trump did not win the presidential election and Brexit did not happen. Despite this, humanity's problems - climate change, economic challenges, epidemics - have indeed remained real, and it presents us with a future that only it can create.