Railhead by Philip Reeve

 

This is a weird novel, a sort of very-far-future SF that somehow manages to have a strong whiff of Cyberpunk to it--corporate overlords, virtual hacking spaces, AIs, the works--though the primary feature of the setting is that humanity has reached the stars by finding a more or less literal railroad (the vehicles at least seem to run on actual rails) through magic-tech gates to the stars. Uh, apparently most of the trains have something like AIs in them. They all have names, and they have different personalities. The story is basically a Cyberpunk story, young thief ends up doing a job for someone who's probably not entirely to be trusted (though he does turn out to be telling more of the truth than the corporate overlords or the AIs, who are more or less the same things; this is probably not a huge surprise). It's reasonably well-written on the prose level, and most of the characters and their motivations are clear. Given this guy's best-known work is a four-book series, I wouldn't be shocked if there were other novels planned to follow on this; I think it ends just fine, and if there are other novels, I won't need to read them. Not the worst use of my evening, not deathless.