The only reason to stop the story where he did is because he's planning a sequel. But he's probably not. If he does, I'll give him his 5th star.

But maybe it stops where it does because, like Ana, the author wants to preserve Jax's innocence. And Marco's as well since he has to stop when the story stops. Characters in a story are stuck in their text as surely as software is bound by hardware. I personally don't believe in conscious software any more than I believe the characters in fiction have actual lives, but that doesn't spoil fiction for me, including this work of fiction.

The tech world with its reliance on money to bring it to life feels tragic to me and the plight of the digients and the humans who love them brings that feeling home to me. Is human life tragic because we have no choice but to mature into sexual beings? Ana says it's the coercion she objects to but the need for finances is a constant coercion in the world.

But some coercions are worse than others. Being a wage slave isn't as bad as being a prostitute. Forced overtime isn't as bad as rape.

Are arranged marriages statistically less successful than those chosen by our own free will? If we're raised in that culture, and our upbringing makes us find a family negotiated union acceptable, perhaps it works out to our advantage?

Is it consensual if we're chemically induced to like what we get? Aren't we chemical beings just like digients are software ones? We like to think we're more than just chemistry which is why we blame junkies for shooting up and think they can just say "no." (I'm in the middle of reading [a:Gabor Maté|4068613|Gabor Maté|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1454508047p2/4068613.jpg]'s book about addiction in which he argues it's possible but prohibitively difficult to walk away from one's drug.) An algorithmic being is nothing BUT coercion even with random number generators hiding the determinism. That a computer generated entity can respond to the love of their human trainer in some deeper way than a mood ring can change color with one's mood is but a literary fiction yet so many of us strive to be more like machines than humans to avoid the pain of being alive. We're all part digient so we can relate.

In the end I think Derek is right. Or maybe no one is right. I'd really like a sequel so we could find out. If this were a movie, there would be money for a sequel and thus there would be a sequel for that is the power of economics.