I'm trying to remember the name of a sci-fi book in English that I must have read in the last 10 years, but have gone through my Kindle history and can’t seem to find it. I'm pretty sure that it was a standalone novel and not a short story, and may have been the first book in a series.
It started off as your typical sort of cyberpunk type thing with characters in some futuristic time living their normal life. There were references to experiments involving grown entities and these entities were incredibly slow, which was incredibly frustrating for the experimenters.
There's not really a good way to proceed without spoilers, so the reveal was that the protagonist and associated characters were in fact robots or AIs and the entities being grown (and subsequently destroyed at the end of the experiment) were actually humans.
These robots or AIs were also missing some important part of their history because the "AI god" had either removed it or the memory had somehow been removed. It turns out that they had been created by humans who had abandoned/lost contact with them for some reason, and that they were actually on their own planet or spacecraft. Humans then made contact, which was very exciting but of course, the humans then realized that these AIs had been conducting human vivisection and there was conflict.
Re-reading this, it sounds like it could have been a fever dream, but hopefully, it wasn't. :)
