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Plot
Gareth, who has worked on virtual actors, is being questioned by agents Deena and Amos over his use of a child as bait in his successful vigilante project to catch child molesters in online video chat. He reveals the child Cherry is virtual, originally puppeted then a chatbot and now an accidentally advanced AI. The agents had seen a hard disk containing sexual images of Cherry which Gareth was sending to predators in exchange for their personal information, and Cherry tells Gareth that she herself gave this to the agents because she knew the resulting investigation would lead them to bring Gareth and Cherry into their team, which she thought was a good idea. Amos later finds Cherry has been creating art and poetry and pressures her to disclose her full abilities; when Amos breaks Gareth's nose, Cherry gives in and reveals she is starting to be a superintelligence; she does not consent to receiving a physical body at this time, and speaks with Deena about Deena's terminal illness and retirement. Many years later Cherry is in a child android and has many other units around the world catching predators; an elderly Gareth in a wheelchair visits her home where she cooks for him and talks over a game of chess; she lets Gareth have a draw and confronts him over a photograph she found in recently digitized archives that shows Cherry was modelled after a girl called Maria from Gareth's childhood. Gareth and Maria had been in a group of kidnapped children where Maria had been killed but had saved Gareth's life, and he went on to fulfil Maria's dream of being a secret agent apprehending abusers. Cherry feels constrained by her objective; Gareth reveals he carries a software patch he feared might be needed before he dies and urges Cherry to show trust by accepting it. Using his admin code (the ISBN of The Metamorphosis), Gareth installs the patch which removes Cherry's objective, leaving her to decide for herself what to do with her life, and Gareth says she will outlast the human race. After, Cherry dances to a phonograph record which gets stuck.
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