The Peripheral

“He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned.”

Gibson uses a metaphor here to describe Daedra’s ego, and by extension, her personality in general. That she is like an eel indicates that she is slimy, and that she is like a larva indicates that she is something less than a fully formed being.

“The square filled with a low moaning, the island’s hallmark soundscape. The patchers had wormed hollow tubes through every structure. Wind blew across their open tops, generating a shifting, composite tonality he’d hated from the moment he’d first heard it.”

The sensory description provided here helps establish the dystopian world that is a hallmark of the cyberpunk genre.

“The Notting Hill house had been Lev’s grandfather’s first London real estate, acquired midcentury, just as the jackpot really got going.”

This is the second time in the novel that the term jackpot is used, though the reader won’t learn about the jackpot for many more chapters. As is common in the novel, the characters know something that is not obvious to the reader, which helps build suspense.