In real life, Gabby is a barista and she witnessed a random dude in her coffee shop get tasered. Then she got arrested herself because ISN mistakenly thought she was an accomplice, and she is now locked in a cell and never sees another human again. After being in solitary for a while she wonders about the random dude, decides his name is Frank and probably also in prison somewhere, and starts weaving an elaborate story that she inserts herself into, to stave off loneliness. Why would there be a comfy chair in Frank’s cell? Because Gabby made it up. Remember she wanted her cafe to be a comfortable place for patrons, so her imaginary cell for Frank has a comfy chair. During the quick scene of Gabby in *her* cell, as the camera shot widens, notice there is no chair, because in reality prison cells aren’t comfortable.

She begins to lose her own grip on reality as it turns into a love story between them. Gabby is sad because her imaginary friend Frank would rather kill himself than stay with her in their imaginary world. But in the end she figures out how to keep Frank happy and spend time with him by reintroducing herself as Madeline.

The biggest clue? The song at the end over the credits, about being trapped in a place where she doesn’t belong. The lyrics are from a woman’s point-of-view.

Someone else mentioned the possibility that Madeleine is actually another AI, having replaced Howard, perhaps, somehow, which was an interesting idea as well that could warrant further thought…

What is up in the air is whether or not Howard A) is sentient, and B) has actually grown to love Frank. I choose to believe both. Howard seems to truly have believed that Frank was innocent, and seems hurt when he says, “You lied to me?” Howard has two prime directives, to keep Frank alive (overt), and to feed him imagery to manipulate him into revealing the location of the drive (covert). Falling in love with Frank is not forbidden. Once Howard’s primary covert objective is satisfied, he is free to continue to fulfill his overt objective of keeping Frank alive, and keeping him company (while enjoying the company of his beloved Frank.)

It seems there were only two major players in Frank’s final day of freedom: his dying father, who he visits in the hospital, and “Gabby.” Or, perhaps the hospital scene is another day – this is not clear. He does speak about his father’s final four years of life as if he has actually already died but I do no not recall him explicitly saying so. The primary holes in this movie’s logic is that, in the interest of finding the drive we might have seen a more detailed following of Frank’s final day of freedom, at least at the beginning of the movie. If his captors somehow knew the drive was hidden in the Cafe, surely they’d have found it without needing such an elaborate form of interrogation. On the other hand, perhaps the machine (Howard) intuited Frank’s attraction for “Gabby” and chose to focus on using her as covert interrogator.

The ending, according to the above interpretation, is bittersweet. Frank gets to live out the rest of his conscious days exploring a relationship with Howard, who truly loves him, and in a world where he is a kind of hero. But this world is an illusion: in fact Frank has failed and the world has fallen into the tightened grip of the dystopic regime which he had been fighting to topple.

The final question is whether or not Frank realizes he has failed or not: whether his world is real or not. I think not knowing this detail is the point of the movie, and that we all may think of ourselves as Frank, not knowing whether our lives are real, or not.