Hard Reset (37:54)
Deepak Chetty; Dust.com; Dust.tv; IMDb; YouTube

This 2015 short film was presented by Dust in 2019.

This was shot in 3D, but of course I only saw it in 2D on YouTube. It's about Miles Archer, a member of a government organization whose job it is to stop the efforts of "emancipators" who give sentience to androids called synths. But Archer has been involved with a synth called Jane for like six months, which is the cutoff period after which clients can't, like, rent the same model of synth anymore. Anyway, he's obviously sympathetic to emanicpators, but his partner, Sebastian Wright, is pretty hardcore opposed to emancipators. One day they get called to an apartment where a synth had gone offline, and it turns out to be Jane, who had unwillingly killed her latest client. He does a reset on Jane, replacing her old data core with a new one. But he and Sebastian receive an order to terminate Jane, which Archer doesn't want to do. Beyond that, I don't want to spoil anything, except to say that there's a twist near the end that I found rather interesting. And really, the whole film is fairly good, even if most of it was somewhat clichéd.