To Sail Beyond the Botnet
Novella 21,920 words Recommended by 2 award/anthology sources
"I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, Bot 9 thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve. It had a lengthy list of Mantra subroutine sets to run after its usual initialization check, and it noted the addition of even more since its last waking, most notably the Mantra of Accepting That Bots Are Not Humans..."
Quasar links out; the story lives on Clarkesworld, where the author gets the click.