A happy-go-lucky girl in a beachfront mining town is having trouble with rashes on her hands and wrists. The local hack tries radical things involving incisions and slicing and such. A guy comes to town for a while and he and the girl fall in love. The rashes gets worse. Finally the hack (who is also her handler, it turns out) raises her hands to show the rash to someone else - something has reached a breaking point. They start yanking electronic bits out of her head and then put new ones in. The rash is gone, and her personality is very changed. She is jumping up on the love interest with her legs around his waist and is very flirty. His family has come down and he is introducing everybody to everybody and they can't believe he would fall for such a girl. She does remember their connection but can't overcome her new drive. He is very upset - he didn't know she was an android and wonders if he can still love such a person. She didn't know she was an android either.
Later: He's shoe-rolling around the parking lot, thinking about all this. She encounters a worker girl behind the store - the girl is an android too, an A14 whose upgrades have stopped because her owner decided she wasn't worth the expense. The main character is an A21. She decides to stop upgrades and leave her personality intact.
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