Incarnate

330th Year of Songs, week 3

What is a soul, but a consciousness born and born again?

With the rise of new technology, we know souls can be measured as a series of vibrations, which Soul Tellers map out on machines. Each sequence is unique. Each sequence is the same as it was in its previous incarnation, no matter how different the body may be. I have been reborn a hundred times, and I remember every generation.

Souls are sentience, an essence born into a new body when the old one dies.

There have always been a million souls, but now we’re a million minus one. Five years ago, the temple flashed dark on the night Ciana died. This evening, when Li gave birth to our daughter, we expected Ciana’s reincarnation. Instead, truths on which we’d built society were irrevocably made uncertain.

Soul Tellers took the newborn’s hand and pressed it on the soul-scanner, and the vibration sequence searched for a match in the database.

There was no match, which means this soul has never been born before. So where did it come from? What happened to Ciana’s soul? Has it been replaced? Might others be replaced?

Is this new soul even real?

— Menehem’s personal diary