The Shell of the Nautilus - Ka's home

[Yerkan of Elish]

"As far as I'm concerned, a soul's just information. Different worlds store 'em differently, so people think they're entirely mysterious and spiritual in one world when they're quite obvious in another. But in reality, different souls are just the same as different languages, or writing systems, or containers for storing vegetables. In Rivenrock, they're imprints of sentience on the ethereal plane. On other worlds, they're pure life force. On still others, they don't have any special distinction between organic matter, so people think they don't exist - but the information's still there, it's just data emerging from the complexities of computation instead of a discrete container.

"One theory I've read about runs that if a being like AIiCE, stored in, say, bits or qbits, travels to another world, all that needs done is to take the proper data and convert into the new form. Creatin' a soul is complicated, but all you ever really have to do is mess around with souls that already exist, reformat them, fiddle with them a bit, and you've got something new, or something in a different form - say, a floating orb in place of a complex system of transistors and wires and superconductors."

[AIiCE]

"Is that how my avatar happened? Is this my ...'soul'?"

[Yerkan of Elish]

"Heh. Not necessarily. That depends not only on some minor variables within this universe, but on how you, specifically, work. It could be your soul - abstract sentience data represented in perceptual form. Or it could be kind of the reverse of my ethereal plane: a physical echo of an abstract thing, created to be your body and a container for your soul.

"But what should I know? I think you can figure this one out on your own."

I turn into an old man with a long, white beard and hobble away.

[Steepest Durin]

Ha ha ha! Yerkan!

Th' point is that I can see an important philosophical distinction between magical tools an' high technology, an' it has somethin' ta do with th' soul of it, th' tradeoffs, mebbe th' gods themselves.

[Grey Aides]

Souls...are unimportant. Power...that defines a man.