In 2136, four years since The Peripheral, the much-suffering publicist Wilf Netherton (now married and with a kid) hears from Ainsley Lowbeer that she's discovered a stub that diverged from their timeline much earlier than previously thought possible — in 2015. The stub's two main divergences, produced by the late psychopath Vespasian, appear to be the results of the Brexit vote (to remain) and of the 2016 US presidential election (Clinton victory). While all this sounds great to Netherton, it's 2017 in the stub and it's already on the brink of nuclear annihilation. What's more, because of its low digital connectivity, Lowbeer has very little agency in the stub, so she instead tries a different approach and needs Netherton's help once more in communicating with the natives.
Meanwhile, in an alternate 2017 San Francisco, a young woman named Verity is hired by a mysterious tech startup Cursion to test-drive their newest VR assistant glasses. She soon discovers, however, that the "assistant" is actually a fully-sentient artificial general intelligence named Eunice. Originally created by the US Navy to manage agents in global hotspots, she was stolen by Cursion in hopes of turning her into an app and selling it to the masses. Unfortunately for them, Eunice has her own agenda and as soon as Verity switches her on, begins setting up a network of agents, both human and AI, to pursue it.
The book contains examples of following tropes:
- Arc Words: "Qamishli" is the name of a small Syrian town near the Turkish border, where, in Verity's timeline, an international incident has just occurred with the shooting down of two Russian military jets by American forces, goading the two nuclear powers into a bout of brinkmanship. The entire novel is set against the backdrop of tense negotiations between Clinton's administration and the Russians, with everyone else trying their hardest not to think too hard about the fact that their world could end at any moment.
- Alternate History: What if the British voted to remain and the Americans elected Clinton in 2016?
- Alternate Timeline: Once again, half of the book is spent in an alternate timeline, this time in one where 2015 and 2016 went very differently to how they did in Real Life and in Netherton's future.
- Appropriated Appellation: People in the county (Flynne's timeline) got sick of the word "stub" applied to them and began calling Lowbeer's timeline "the big stub" in return, much to the latter's consternation.
- The Atoner: Lowbeer's internal need to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, averting the jackpot, if only in a stub, has grown to consume all of her free time (i.e. whenever she is not herding the klept).
- Badass Biker: Grim Tim, the mute barista running a coffee shop near where Verity lives, owns a Harley and is a much better rider than anyone else in her vicinity. Naturally, Eunice immediately recruits him into her network to drive Verity through dangerous territory.
- Benevolent A.I.: Eunice. After some subtle prodding from the future, she winds up developing into the most powerful intelligence on the planet, being able to carry on a conversation with anyone at once and determined to avert the jackpot.
- Brain Uploading: Lowbeer suspects from the start that Eunice is the accidental result of a botched consciousness upload experiment by the US military. In the end, she discovers that Eunice's personality is indeed based on a female Navy officer who later died in an IED explosion in Afghanistan.
- China Takes Over the World: Played With. China's situation in the "big stub" is described in more detail in this book: as the jackpot got going, the Chinese state had cut off all contact to the outside world, isolating itself as everything else went to shit. As a result, pretty much everything outside of China is ruled by the (mostly) London-based kleptocracy, but China has the world's most advanced tech and, presumably, the largest surviving population.
- Continuity Creep: Downplayed but still notable in the context of the rest of Gibson's body of work. While his older books had generally been connected very loosely within their respective trilogies by a few secondary characters and common themes, the post-jackpot half of Agency is a direct continuation of that of The Peripheral, with the same main characters (Netherton, Lowbeer, Ash). Meanwhile the only members of the core pre-jackpot Peripheral cast that do not return are Flynne and Burton, and even their later exploits are addressed in plaintext. This is all the stranger in light of Verity and Eunice's story having originally begun as a standalone book, which Gibson largely rewrote and Canon Welded into the "Jackpotverse" after 2016.
- Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Like Flynne, Verity is a young woman who gets unknowingly drawn into the plot when she's hired to playtest a seeimingly normal piece of software. However, while Flynne is from a small Dying Town in a possible near future (from our perspective) where playtesting is a deadend job, and was dropped into things more or less at random when something went wrong, Verity is a reasonably famous San Fransisco "app whisperer" in an alternate past (again, from our perspective; they're both alternate pasts to the "big stub") who was specifically chosen (albeit not by her employer) to fulfill her role in the book.
- Didn't Think This Through:
- It's entirely unclear what Cursion thought Eunice was or what they expected to do with her, since they go from tight-lipped NDA to violently panicked flailing pretty much as soon as they realise the AI actually has a mind of its own. Lowbeer and Ash characterise them throughout as not nearly as clever as they think they are, and prone to reacting badly whenever they're forced to realise this.
- It's apparently never previously occurred to Manuela (or, presumably, most casual Followrs workers) that if you're hired as a deniable asset to follow someone on behalf of someone else, either or both of those people might prove to be dangerous.
- Flying Car: Turns out that Lowbeer's armored, invisible, luxurious command center on wheels also comes with a (similarly cloaked) detachable quadcopter that can lift it into the skies of London on command.
- Fun with Acronyms: Eunice's name means "good victory" in Greek, but is actually a mispronunciation of UNISS, the code name of the US military black ops project that originally produced her.
- The Ghost: Despite being regularly mentioned, Flynne Fisher never once appears in person in this book, unlike several minor characters from her stub, particularly Conner.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Conner, the disabled, traumatized vet of the Haptic Recon, returns from The Peripheral. Now the Secret Service boss under President Leon Fisher in his own stub, he is bored out of his mind, and so jumps at the opportunity to pilot a bodyguard drone for Verity in her timeline. He is still as nonchalant about hurting fellow human beings as before, but most of it is Played for Laughs and towards the end of the book, Lowbeer observes that he has mellowed out a lot, preferring to disable his opponents if possible, instead of immediately resorting to lethal force like he did in The Peripheral.
- Implacable Man: Cursion hires an ex-military operator named Kevin Pryor to capture Verity. Despite Conner's best efforts, using the stub's most lethal tech, Pryor keeps surviving and coming after Verity. In the end, he comes within 50 meters of her before Eunice scares him off — and that only because Cursion goes bust at the same time, effectively cancelling his contract.
- Like Brother and Sister: Verity and her roommate are very close, but in an entirely non-romantic manner. She later explains that she doesn't have any cousins, but treats him as one.
- The Mafiya: The origin of the klept. As the jackpot got worse and worse, Lowbeer found herself relying on Russian and other ex-Soviet organized crime groups who managed to keep their cohesion thanks to prior experience while everyone else failed. While not exclusively Russian, most of the klept descends from those criminal groups.
- Mother of a Thousand Young: Eunice is a technological variant. She is a "laminar"
AI, which can spawn lesser copies of herself at any time to take care of multiple tasks at once. The copies, known as "laminae", have different personalities from her and apparently find their own hardware to run on, so they do not share memory and consciousness with her until they complete their respective task and rejoin Eunice's main "body". They are even capable to recompiling said "main body" in case it gets destroyed. - Mysterious Employer: Cursion, to Verity. They are fairly transparent to Eunice and Lowbeer, but are a dangerous mystery to most humans in 2017.
- Secret Test of Character: Like she wont to do, Lowbeer once again sets up one for Pryor, Cursion's operative, testing whether he would shoot down a plane with innocents on board just to prevent Verity from leaving the country. It turns out, he would, which presumably fails her test, so she leaves his fate up to Eunice.
- Sharing a Body: Happens accidentally when Verity has to use Flynne's old peripheral during her first visit to the big stub, since Lowbeer did not have the time to arrange a fresh one for her (Flynne is not currently using it). In the epilogue, Wilf mentions that Verity got her own peripheral later and became fast friends with Flynne.
- Switching P.O.V.: Like in The Peripheral, each chapter told from Verity's point of view is immediately followed by one from Wilf's, and vice versa.
- Time Skip: Four years have passed since The Peripheral, during which Wilf married Rainey and had a son named Thomas with her, while in Flynne's stub (colloquially referred as "the county"), her family and friends have formed a proto-klept, effectively ruling the world out of their fortified compound and even (legitimately!) winning the next presidential election for Flynne's cousin Leon.
- Title Drop: While one may think the title refers to some Government Agency of Fiction, it's actually about the Central Theme of the book — the concept of agency, i.e. the real ability of individuals to make meaningful choices about their lives. Most commonly, it is mentioned in relation to Eunice's agency, but also to the agency of the people in Verity's stub, as well as to Lowbeer's in hers.
- Vetinari Job Security: Definitely played with, as it becomes apparent that Lowbeer has effectively managed to grant herself this. Her role as "The Adjudicator", the only remaining law-enforcement authority with jurisdiction over the klept, and its accompanying godlike powers, are begrudgingly tolerated by the oligarchs as most are smart enough to realise that, without something keeping their scheming in check, they'd wipe themselves out and/or restart the apocalypse. But even then, Agency establishes that when one of the klept starts plotting against Lowbeer, she wipes them and their co-conspirators out. Hence, the only possible way for Lowbeer to lose her power would be, presumably, for the entire klept to turn on her simultaneously. And given that obeying her allows you to enjoy your obscene wealth in peace, while antagonising her gets you atomically disassembled... It's no stretch to call her the true ruler of London.
- Villainous Legacy: While the klept is bad news, Vespasian has easily been the most evil person in Wilf's timeline seen so far. While he was executed by Lowbeer in The Peripheral, his legacy lives on, as he was the one who created Verity's stub before his death.
- Working with the Ex: Verity had to hide from paparazzi for a while after amicably breaking up with her tech billionaire boyfriend Stetson Howell. When Cursion starts hunting her, Eunice concludes that Howell is her best protector, which is only slightly awkward because he is already engaged to another woman. Fortunately, his fiancee immediately takes a liking to Verity.
