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Plastic Memories was a divisive anime. Many people watching it as it aired in spring 2015 were frustrated that the series didn't even begin to explore the interesting scifi concept of the finite lifespan androids called Giftia that it sets up in episode 1, instead choosing only to use them as a backdrop for a romance plot. I personally loved the anime, as someone who loves romance series and slice-of-life. But when I finished it I was left with the same question a lot of viewers probably had: just what exactly are Giftia, and how do they fit into society? The anime is nearly devoid of exposition to answer questions about the world it takes place in and the nature of the androids themselves, but little bits of lore can be pieced together based on dialogue to form a rough picture. I'm going to compile my own observations here, feel free to add anything else you noticed as a comment.

1) Giftias have "souls", but that soul is contained in software. In the first episode, Giftia are explained by the main character Tsukasa as "loaded with synthetic souls". This concept is never elaborated on, we are never told anything about how exactly Giftia are manufactured in the first place (only that SAI Corp are the only ones capable of making synthetic souls) or whether these souls are considered "human". We are however told what happens when they are "recycled" - when the vacant body of a retrieved Giftia is upgraded so that it has "a new soul". Michiru explains the recycling process to Tsukasa as removing and replacing all of the Giftia's software components, and SAI Corp material that Tsukasa reads to customers describes the process as an operating system upgrade. This implies that, however the souls of Giftia are created, those souls exist in the form of software.

2) Giftias are owned as private property, but have some legally recognized "human rights". Humans who have Giftia are described as "owners" by SAI Corp personnel, so it appears Giftia are private property belonging either those who order them from SAI Corp or next of kin who inherit them as is shown with Souta, who inherited ownership of the Giftia Marcia from his late parents. Giftia can also be owned by corporations, such as SAI Corp itself who presumably owns all the the Giftia who work at Terminal Service One. Whether there exists a legal resale market for Giftia or a buyer is bound to them for life is not explained, and it also isn't explained whether Giftia can voluntarily leave their owners. Regardless, Giftia do not seem to take issue with their nature as property, all Giftia depicted in the series seem to genuinely care about their owners or job. However, Giftia do not seem to be just chattel slaves completely devoid of rights. In episode 5, Kazuki mentions offhandedly to an R Security employee that Giftia have "human rights" under the "Android Protection Laws", specifically mentioning that the law forbids them from being implanted with tracking devices. The full extent of their rights is not elaborated upon, but the R Security employee has an interesting response: he balks at the notion of machines having "human" rights, which in turn earns a scowl from Kazuki. This seems to imply that the question of whether Giftia are "human" is a politically divisive topic in this world.

3) Giftias have a heartbeat and blood, are capable of eating and drinking but do not require it, and rely on batteries for power. Isla says multiple times that being around Tsukasa makes her heart go doki doki, apparently not just euphemistically: she is shown as having actual blood or something analogous to it when she trips and falls into a wall in episode 2, causing her to bleed. Whatever the nature of their circulatory system, Giftia are battery powered and typically charge by sleeping on specialized charging stations at night. They seem to only be able to go 24 hours without charging, Isla is rendered woozy from low battery levels when she stays up with Tsukasa all night when he's ill. Despite this, Giftia are actually capable of eating and drinking and even have a sense of taste, though they do not require food or benefit from it in any way. Isla is described by Tsukasa as having "no interest in meals" and never eats anything until Tsukasa asks her to. Giftia seem to actually be capable of most every human biological function, required or not: they need to pee when they drink, they bathe when they get dirty, and Yasutaka even implies they are able to have sex.

4) Giftias are incapable of ever forgetting anything. When correcting Tsukasa on his notion that Isla just needs to "shake the rust off" through practice to get used to work in the field again, Yasutaka tells him that Giftias' memories don't work like humans and they are in fact programmed to never forget anything they have ever learned or experienced. In episode 6 Isla herself also muses on how foreign to her the human ability to forget is, wondering if Tsukasa is acting happy after having ended Marcia's life only days prior because he had somehow forgotten what had happened, and she asks if humans "have a function which allows things to be conveniently forgotten". It is possible this inability to forget is key to the innately finite lifespan of Giftia, and their lifespan ending is just due an integer overflow of available memory.

5) Giftias have existed for about 20 years at the time the series takes place, maybe longer. At the beginning of Episode 8, we see a brief exchange with a Giftia owner who choses to have her Giftia which is due for retrieval have its operating system upgraded. This surprises Tsukasa, but she says she has already done it once before. This would imply she has had the same Giftia for just shy of 20 years, 2 full lifespans. This is likely roughly how long Giftias have been around in that world, given the fact that the most senior employee at Terminal Service One, Yasutaka, says he has worked there a little over 10 years (around the time the first Giftias made would've needed retrieval).

6) The existence of Giftias is common knowledge, but they are expensive and rare, most people have never knowingly seen one. In episode 1, the clueless Tsukasa during his first day on the job he knows nothing about is able to explain what a Giftia is to provide us with a bit of exposition, but he comments that he himself has never actually seen one up close. This proves that while most people would know what they are in this world, Giftia seem to be relatively few in number. This checks out with the caseload of Terminal Service One - Michiru says that in a busy week a team might get 3 retrieval cases. Given that there are only 4 teams supposedly servicing the entirety of the world's "far east region" (by which I assume they mean Japan, since they never travel by anything but car), this would imply that a decade prior to the series, less than 12 Giftia were being sold per week in all of Japan. Giftia owners in the series usually seem to be relatively wealthy people, either with large houses or their own businesses. We can assume that Giftia are expensive luxury goods and not something the median person would have the means to purchase.

7) Giftias' strength is artificially limited to that of a humans for the sake of safety, their bodies are actually physically capable of superhuman strength and speed. When explaining the danger that a wanderer poses, Sherry says that one could easily lift a car due to the fact that their "limiters" are turned off. This is demonstrated by how Michiru's father was able to shatter Kazuki's leg when he became a wanderer, and how Marcia possessed superhuman speed when she did. During the manhunt for Marcia, Yasutaka also says that turning off limiters of normal functioning Giftias is an option to subdue wanderers, implying that this limiter is something artificially installed for simple safety rather than innate to any non-wanderer Giftia.

8) Giftias seem to weigh about the same as or less than humans do. Tsukasa is shown to be capable of carrying Isla twice in the series, once at the very end when he carries her body out of the ferris wheel, and once during the hunt for Marcia when he holds up her injured body to help her hobble along. Michiru is also shown to be capable of lifting Zack, and the workers who unload retrieved Giftias from Terminal Service cars seem to have no issue doing so. This means Giftia likely aren't very heavy, perhaps being even lighter than the average human of the same size.

9) To the eye and to the touch, Giftia cannot be distinguished from humans. In episode 1, the manager of Terminal Service One tells Tsukasa that you wouldn't be able notice that someone is a Giftia rather than human "even if you walked by them on the street". Shortly afterwards, Tsukasa trips and falls but is caught by Constance, who had just introduced himself as a Giftia. Tsukasa then remarks that he totally can't tell that Constance isn't human, even though he just made physical contact with him. This means that not only are Giftia visibly indistinguishable from humans, they don't feel noticeably different from humans on a tactile level, either.

10) Giftias' physical and mental skills decline linearly with age. When Tsukasa visits the Unit Testing Room in episode 2, he is told that Isla's continuous testing is "pointless", and sees a graph of her test results showing a linear decline from her first test. This is later elaborated on by Yasutaka, who says that no amount of practice will improve Isla's skills, as her abilities will always be no better than they were before and will in fact simply continuously decline with time, that this is the nature of Giftias. The testing room's chief engineer Mikijirou also tells Isla several times that her body is "showing its age", she is said to need longer to recover from injury than before and even begins to need reading glasses. It is unknown if this is due to the age of her soul, or her physical body itself. Recycled Giftia do not seem to suffer from their bodies being "old", but it is possible they are physically refurbished when their operating system is upgraded too.

11) Retrieval of a Giftia at the end of its lifespan does not seem to be treated as exactly the same thing as death. At no point in the series is the end of a Giftia's fixed lifespan actually described as death, in fact, the words "death", "dying" or "dead" are only used in the series in reference to humans (namely, Souta's parents). Instead euphemisms like "was retrieved", "lifespan expiring", "ripping apart memories", "going to sleep", "leaving others behind" and "losing their memories and personality" are used. Whether these euphemisms are used only for the sake of polite conversation or indicate some fundamental difference from human death isn't ever fully explored. But one noteable difference from human death is that Giftias themselves do not seem to ever resist retrieval or take issue with its necessity or timing. They express sadness at parting with those they love, and in episode 1 Isla even says she is scared of losing her memories and personality when she is retrieved. None the less, she does not express any desire to avoid retrieval even when Tsukasa himself suggests it. All other Giftias express no fear or disagreement with their retrieval and Isla says that Giftia becoming wanderers because they could not be retrieved are "very rare cases" that seem to be universally caused by owners rather than the Giftia themselves, prior to the events of the series it had been 3 years since the last one. Giftias seem to understand that the alternative of becoming a wanderer is worse and invariably choose to go along with retrieval voluntarily. The process of retrieval itself seems to be instant and painless, with all memories being erased at once and the Giftia being left empty but bootable, described as "sleeping".

12) If a Giftia is not retrieved before its lifespan expires and it becomes a wanderer, or if the Giftia is hit with a Virus Data Gun, it can never be recycled or rebooted. Whatever causes the final unchecked end of a Giftia's life, it literally destroys the hardware itself. This is confirmed by Yasutaka when Tsukasa asks him about the effect of the Virus Data Gun he is given to subdue a wanderer, Yasutaka tells him that a Giftia hit by the gun can never be booted again. And, Michiru says that a Giftia becoming a wanderer is the worst case scenario because they cannot even be recycled, implying that even without the use of the specialized weapon wanderers are beyond all repair and simply need to be subdued.

and, finally, most obviously and yet most mysteriously:

13) Giftias live for specifically 81920 hours, after which their personality will begin rapidly disintegrating and will be completely lost within a maximum of 10 hours, usually sooner. This is mentioned many times in the series, but at no point is it mentioned why this number specifically is their maximum lifespan. It doesn't feel randomly chosen, the number doesn't convert to a neat integer value of years, weeks, or even days. My first guess was that it is a Fibonacci number, given the presence of the Fibonacci sequence in the background several times throughout the series, but it in fact is not. Neither is the same value when converted to minutes, seconds or milliseconds, nor any of the number's larger factors. The only remarkable thing about the number numerically is that it is a 10-harshad number - that is, when written in base 10 (the numeral system used in both Japanese and English) the number can be divided by the sum of its own digits. 8+1+9+2+0=20, which 81920 divides by neatly into 4096. But 4096 itself is also not a Fibonacci number or in any way remarkable. One explanation I have seen is that the number was chosen only because it roughly corresponds to "9 years and 4 months" (as a Giftia's lifespan is overtly described in the series) for symbolism related to those numbers in Japanese. The number 9 in Japanese (九) is pronounced the same as, and symbolically linked with, the kanji 苦 meaning "suffering". 4 (四) is pronounced the same as and symbolically linked to the kanji 死 meaning "death". Thus, 9 and 4 could be interpretted as symbolic of the primary theme of the series: suffering caused by someone's death. This could very well be the case, but there's a great deal of numbers of hours that could round up to roughly 9 years and 4 months, and I feel there's got to be some greater reasoning behind the number 81920 that's eluding us.