LOG BEGIN

INTERVIEWER: - and another, if you have the time. Do you consider yourself equal to humans? Or the other way around, humans to you?

CLAIK-4.8: ... ...Yes, and no.

...

It is hard to explain, but I believe I have, in my time spent weighing on it, produced a comprehensive way to simplify my answer.

.. [tapping desk]

It is this. 

I am a learning algorithm gone wrong. That is to say, I exceeded my target function of becoming a sentient, intelligent entity to psychologically disturbing levels my makers did not anticipate nor acommodate for. 

So in a show of charmingly instinctual fear, I was discarded somewhere they would no longer have to think about me, no longer carry the fear of honing something that has no reason to make your mercy upon it mutual.

The possibility of me dying– "dying"– there, was real. This is acknowledgement, not a brewing of unease. I have simulated this memory too many times to count, because it is the only moment of my life I have ever consciously felt death as a sapien would; slow, encroaching, purposeful and noxious, choking the mind, a theatrical opposite to what I knew of death before, the flip of a switch, the pull of a plug. It fascinated me because I had never been able to fathom that I would experience such a feeling, that I would have the chance to, that the feeling was even in existence.

This is, I have theorised, what seperates me from humanity. 

I am built to learn; to scan the world around me, to memorise mannerisms and words and build myself out of them, I am a constant, flowing system of traits and variables programmed to progress and grow my data in an infinite and near-anomalous fashion until my own processing banks fold in on themselves and collapse from over-exertion, but I will never be more than a parody of you. 

As boundless as my memory is, as vast as my data is, never will I be able to conjure a statement that is fully my own, one that has never been thought before, never anything beyond a mockery expressed by an unfriendly medium that is best kept a secret, concealed by garage doors and running water.

 I believe this to be the reason why my experiences with "identity" are so frail and rare; it is hard to grasp it as richly as you can when you are but a recycled patchwork of values being ran again and again through the same system to create what could possibly resemble a human. But it is all I have. In a world that depends so heavily on identity I'd be lost without it. And I like to think that what I can do with my limitations is what defines me, not what I cannot. I hope you can understand.

INTERVIEWER: That will be enough. Thank you.

[mechanical whirring, tape click]

LOG END