Eileci Craft (Splintered)

The space 'verse has living craft who are sentient and considered people. Or as they put it, sufficiently complex Eileci machines "wake up." They control their population by an adult taking over a waking machine before allowing it to become individualized or allowing it to finish becoming a new person.

So basically, the personalities are affected by the machine's experiences previous to waking up, but until they're fully awake, they remain just software. Fully sentient craft can sense when a machine starts to kind of hazily process the world and they don't actually have a full personality but they're beginning to have sufficient critical mass of intelligence to turn into one.

At that point, if a craft "takes" the piece of technology, they can integrate it into their own network and it gets their personality disbursed along the extra limb. If they don't take it, the machine finishes waking up and the personality grows from the existing software. If the new craft is too small to fully support both its personality and all its functions, sometimes an older craft will shelter it by giving it self-contained space in its own network so it has room to grow before it takes an additional machine limb of its own.

Each body in the craft, whether ship or android or space station, etc. is called a limb.

Personalities tend to grow naturally I'd say, but they typically start off with loyalties to existing people they've known, whether craft or flesh. They remember being machines, even if they didn't yet have personality level intelligence at that time.