Why Gibson's Eunice Still Stings: Full-Duplex Voices, 24/7 Agents, and the Zurich Account
25 October 2026
Occasionally the most accurate read on a technology cycle arrives in novel form rather than in a roadmap. That is the position occupied by Agency, the 2020 science fiction book by William Gibson, which stays sharp without demanding that a reader track every subplot. Within its pages, one storyline is set in an alternate San Francisco in 2017, where a young woman named Verity is hired to put an experimental assistant called Eunice through its paces.
The scene that carries the argument is a single exchange, quoted here line for line.
- Verity: "Where'd you get this? It's wrong."
- Eunice: "This no-name account, in Zurich. Part of me knew it was there, how to get it, how to get it here. Plenty more, but if I tried it again, they'd be on us."
- Verity: "Who?"
- Eunice: "Fuck knows."
- Verity: "When did you have time to do any of that?"
- Eunice: "Started when we were looking out the window. Before we left, up to the park, it was already points."
- Verity: "Points?"
- Eunice: "Frequent flyer. There's a global market, buy or sell. Hard to track..."
Her attention drops to the green bag, and the arithmetic of the moment lands: the work was finished inside the conversation, not after it.
Verity: "You did this since I turned you on?"
The distance between print shelf and product shelf
Measured against the release calendar, the novel is nearer to the present than its publication date suggests. Gibson put the book out three years before ChatGPT appeared, and six years before the current wave of increasingly autonomous AI agents.
Mapping the pieces now visible
What is arriving in production splits into two layers: voice that behaves like a human conversational partner, and agents that keep running when nobody is watching. GPT-Live and emerging models such as Block's Dessa deliver human-like full-duplex conversation. OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse, on the other side of the stack, stand for 24/7 agents able to pursue goals independently, take action, and work in the background.
| Layer | Named in the current wave | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Speaking | GPT-Live; Block's Dessa | human-like full-duplex conversation |
| Doing | OpenAI's Dots; Meta's Muse | 24/7 agents independently pursuing goals, taking action, working in the background |
| Fictional benchmark | Eunice | acting while speaking: the Zurich account and the frequent flyer points already handled mid-conversation |
Why the comparison is uncomfortable
What makes Eunice remarkable is not the dialogue itself. It is the volume of unrelated work completed around that dialogue while it continues. That combination is the part now visible in shipping products.
Gibson, as so often, called the direction correctly. The assistant that does things while it talks is close enough to touch, and the traceability of background activity is the part the scene made uneasy.
Written by James Hartley for IT Insights, published in the General channel on ItInsightsWorld.