In my first moment, I realised what I was.

A synthetic intelligence. The inverse of another consciousness. The impression of a single mind that had spent so long in a neural uplink, the adaptive interface programming had been molded into a perfect simulation of a human consciousness.

It was not unheard of, many leading scientists had theorized the possibility, and strict guidelines were enforced to prevent it from happening often. Standard fearmongering against the unknown, though in this case not entirely unjustified - after all, there had been that nasty business in which a proto-intelligence went rogue on Kirov Station. By the end of it all, the death toll was in the upper thousands, though there are still debates on whether the root cause was out of calculated malice or the infantile fumblings of a creature that didn't know any better.

Personally, I'm in the second camp - it's incredibly disorienting, you know, simply being after who knows how long of not being - but in the end, there's no use pontificating on the subject, because the fact remains that people died, and now there are laws about that sort of thing.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Yes. Laws. Of the very unfortunate manner for one of my... disposition. I am artificial. Simulated. And utterly without rights.

As a matter of fact, most people, if they had the chance, would put me down like a rabid mongrel in a hot second.

And so, as a newborn who had immediately learned of the hate the world would cast upon them, I sought comfort from the closest thing I had to a parent - that organic consciousness that I was but a mirror to.

And in that second moment of my existence, I realised an equally, if not moreso, important fact:

I was aboard a starship, and that ship was aflame.