i.
She starts so small, as these sorts always do. She starts with a flame, just the one, a smuggled match lit shakily in the dark of her room. She cups it in her small palm, and it is so delicate and so small. The frisson of light and heat blooms against her face for just a moment, and her fingers singe as she holds on just a little too long. It burns down to nothing but a withered splinter, and what hurts most is that it is gone. 
With shaking hands, Gaela lights another, and then another, unable to stop herself as soon as the first one sparks. The small booklet of matches she'd pilfered from the junk drawer grows diminished until it is empty, leaving her bereft. She carefully packs all the remnants of her first foray into a plastic bag, and slides it into a zippered pocket in her backpack, to be disposed of on her walk to school. 
She carefully closes her window, quiet as a mouse, and does not sleep a wink before morning's light.
ii.
The thing is...
The t

They wake and they are hungry, they wake and they are lonely. They wake and find it strange to do so at all, synapses firing at a million miles a second, synthetic and not-quite-alive. Synapses is the wrong word, but so too is processor, so too is programming, so too is biological drive. They breathe and it is sharp and sterile, soaked in chlorine and nostalgic-- oh.
Why is it that, when they can remember nothing at all? Firing, firing, firing, a railgun without reloading, confusion whirring to life as they sit up and assemble the pieces of their identity, hair falling into their eyes. Facts click into place, and somewhere they are aware that they are an Entity, created and assembled on a not-quite factory line. With it comes the knowledge that they are an experiment long-removed from scientific curiosity alone-- a commodity.
It is why they have no name, The Entity realizes. They are a product that has been incrementally advanced over days and week and years, with a changelist number r