Peter and Julie are the parents of two elementary-school aged children, Matt and Melissa. Matt is a biological child, whereas Melissa is an extremely accurate android called a synth, which are becoming increasingly common and are virtually indistinguishable from humans. The parents are learning how to adapt to their children's needs as they grow, but they are aided by cookies, which are computers wired directly into their brains that let them communicate with the outside world as well as monitor their children. Peter and Julie, who already live a retro lifestyle, decide to disconnect from their cookies for good in order to be more present in the moment. At first it is difficult, but after some time they readjust to life without constant connection to the virtual world. Julie says she begins to miss the ability to check in on their children at any minute of the day, but Peter thinks they've made the right decision. When they go in for a parent-teacher conference, their teacher had assumed that they constantly monitored their daughter like all the other parents, but Peter and Julie correct her. The teacher says that is fine, but she tells them about a slight verbal altercation their daughter had with her classmate Dimitri, who is known to be something of a bully, especially towards synths. When Dimitri had made fun of one of Melissa's friends, she told him that he was going to die, but the synths won't. Peter and Julie are proud of their daughter's sense of fairness and confidence to stand up to a bully, but Peter nonetheless decides to talk to his daughter about the incident. He tells her that she should not have been mean to her classmate, and that nobody knows if synths died or not, since the oldest one is only in his twenties. During the conversation, Melissa asks about Supers, which were a variant of synths designs to be super-soldiers and cops, but they began to abuse their power and went rogue. Unable to be destroyed, humans had locked them up or put up mechanisms to keep them away. Melissa doesn't think it was fair that the Supers had to be locked up. Peter visits his children after school in order to check up on them since he no longer has his cookie activated. Matt usually plays on the playground by himself, but sometimes Melissa shows her father her climbing skills. When Peter tells Julie that he enjoys the new disconnected lifestyle, she confesses that she has been using her cookie every night before bed to monitor the children. But she noticed that Melissa's readings are a recorded loop, meaning that she intentionally disguises herself from them. Peter brushed it off as a child merely seeking independence. But shortly after seeing that her parents had looked in on her through their cookies, Melissa sneaks off to the playground, where she and the other synths had set up a meeting place and are planning a rebellion against the humans. First, Melissa has to climb to the top of a telephone pole to dismantle the pitons that had been set up to keep out the Supers.