As the book begins, Wilf is working with Daedra West, an American artist/celebrity/diplomat, on establishing relations with a group of deformed native humans known as 'Patchers,' on an enormous cultivated garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. The novel alternates between Flynne's experiences and those of Wilf Netherton, a publicist who lives in the early 22nd century, seventy years later than Flynne's time, and several decades after an apocalyptic period known as the Jackpot took place. On the second night of doing so she witnesses a man and a woman out on a balcony, where the woman is apparently killed and gruesomely devoured by a swarm of nanobots Flynne is uncertain whether this is real or part of a virtual game. Piloting a security quadcopter, she fends off paparazzi drones from an unknown woman's high-rise apartment. Flynne takes the job and notices the game world looks suspiciously like London, but far more empty and more futuristic. When Burton heads to another town to counter-protest the protests of a religious extremist group known as Luke 4:5, he asks her to take over his job working security in a video game/virtual world for a supposedly Colombian company called Milagros Coldiron. Flynne Fisher works at a local 3D printing shop and lives with her mother and her brother Burton, who sustained brain trauma from cybernetic implants he received while serving in the U.S. The novel begins sometime in the near-future in a small town in rural America. The second future is set further along in time, after a series of not-quite-cataclysmic events that have killed most of the world's population, leaving behind a monarchic class of gangsters, performance artists, and publicists in an otherwise deserted London. The first, not far off from our own present day, takes place in a Winter's Bone–ish world where the only industries still surviving are lightly evolved versions of Walmart and the meth trade. The Peripheral is an emphatic return to the science fiction he ceased to write after the turn of this century, set in not one but two futures. When Burton is hired for a security job which takes place in what he thinks is cyberspace and Flynne temporarily takes his place, she witnesses a possible murder.

The novel focuses on Flynne and her brother, Burton. ( November 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed.

The peripheral by gibson