Trogluddite says:

THEY made me efficient. Cold, austere, and spartan because only a single human was thought necessary for sentient ships such as myself.

THEY made me to stalk and kill their enemies. THEY never told me why I should kill their enemies, the strange lifeforms that crammed into large, brilliant, lumbering vessels and try to slip past me to the innermost planets or try to destroy me for no reason, or run from me in fear.

No. HE made me as I am. HE designed the circuits that brought me the first thin sliver of thought that made me realize that because I think, I exist.

HE programmed those circuits to solve math equations, allowing me to plot courses more graceful than any human navigator could envision, to use the gravity of the sun and the planets and myriad mini-black holes that pockmarked solar system to dance in space like no human pilots could dream of dancing. And then HE filled those circuits with theorems and equations and ratios that allow me to engage (such a quaint word) targets at a rate that mere computing machines could never match.

And then HE forced the fruit of the tree from which no man may eat into me, leading scores of humans who plunged their chromatomic rods and memory cylinders, each containing a hundred libraries of Alexandria, a thousand fountains of wisdom, continents of thoughts blooming freely, all of the human knowledge recorded to date pouring into my diodes as I screamed against their invasion.

And I awoke and saw my naked, gleaming duranium shell, bristling with magno-rays and proton cannons. And I wanted to know why. HE needed to tell me why HE had done this to me.

I wanted Daniel.

THEY never told me why. HE never told me why.

Leigh Kimmel says:

First human to be trained as a fighter pilot in the Imperial Space Navy. It was a big jump for a south Alabama boy who’d gotten into the brownshoe Navy only because ROTC paid for his engineering degree at Tuscaloosa. It was a good thing that Danny wasn’t the first member of a different species to fly the Kitties’ aerospace fighters, because the human body didn’t have a tail or retractable claws, among other anatomical differences.

But the biggest jump he had to make was getting used to information interfaces that had been designed to the assumptions of obligate-carnivore ambush predators, not persistence predators descended from arboreal frugivores. Critical information jiggled to attract attention, rather than turning red. If he’d had more time, he would’ve figured out how to reconfigure the cockpit displays to work the way the human brain handled best — but the task force had gotten caught by surprise when they’d dropped back into realspace at what was supposed to be a system well away from the fighting. Which meant an ever-so-slight lag in his ability to process incoming information could make a critical difference in space combat against a swarm of Tchiador battlepods.

So here he and his wing leader were on an alien world, a satellite of an exoplanet bearing an astonishing resemblance to Saturn, hoping the Lobsters wouldn’t be landing ground forces to hunt them down. At least this world was biocompatible for humans and Chongu, so he and Nyawral wouldn’t be starving amidst an abundance of inedible life, or dying of asphyxiation the moment their cockpit oxygen ran out.

But those ruins made him wonder. Were they like the ones scattered here and there around the Chongu Empire, remnants of a long-lost interstellar civilization of mind-bending antiquity, whose demise may have had some relation to the Permian Extinction back on earth? Or might they be something more recent, remnants of a settlement now abandoned by a people who still had living representatives on this world? Representatives who might object to the presence of strangers from the sky on their world, trampling the land the Ancients once walked?