This thread quotes a big post from three years ago and is otherwise absolutely uninteresting

[Rohen_Tahir]

one of my favourite lore explanations is based on the fact that souls exist

One reason for assassination objectives in my headcanon is to temporarily detach a targets soul from their body. Combined with some off-screen sabotage or botched paperwork at a Nanotrasen cloning facility, a Syndicate facility with the right cloning data and tech could potentially steal a soul. Some up-scaling extrapolation from here leads to nuke ops being a method of temporarily detaching many souls at once, perhaps for a quantity over quality approach at stealing souls.

What they need bodies inhabited with souls for could be anything. Interrogation, mindbreaking into operatives/traitors/revheads, hostage-taking, who knows.

Since cloning tech upgrades now create sentient (though damaged) clones of people that still have their original souls this becomes a little bit more fuzzy. Where do these extra souls come from? Do the damaged clones really have souls? Did technology finally harness the reproductive magic of the natural womb?

It's simple. Prototype cloning console can do three things: It can either produce a clone with no higher brain activity, a clone with brain activity with a soul, and a clone with brain activity with an original soul. Unlike newer cloning equipment, which grabs the specific soul from local soul-field (uploading UI+UE disk changes outer appearance, but maintains most of the nervous system), prototype cloning machine tries to jam in any soul it can find. This has the side-effect of wiping most of it's memories - non-supernatural skills and abilities the soul has are transferred, but anything personal and/or recent is gone, except for information that is common enough to imprint itself upon a soul (like "this is a space station", "Nanotrasen is this and that" etc).
A faulty clone can then begin to develop it's own personality. If it dies again, as it is common, it's pre-cloning and post-cloning selves merge, until a clone is cloned using either cloning machine, in which case the process either repeats itself, or pre-cloning memories are detached again.


In fact, one can begin to theorize that spacemen souls are made up of several components. A higher soul, carrying most memories, personality and brainwashing, that is responsible for actions, and a lower soul, carrying skills and common knowledge, that serves as the "powerhouse" of sentience. Most of the time, spessmen souls are united. When they die, the "OOC" (Operating Outside Context) soul is added, providing additional information to the now disembodied spessmen. When they are in any way given ability to interact with the material plane (save some very specific actions by divine), the "OOC" soul is detached. All information gained on the soul plane is transferred to the "OOC" soul as it leaves, leaving higher and lower soul in the state they were when they left the material plane.

Normal cloning drags down both higher and lower soul, while ancient cloning, as well as some soul-receptacles (Ash-walker eggs, golem shells and others), separate a willing soul into it's higher and lower components. The lower component is dragged down into the material world, while the higher component, bereft of the powerhouse of sentience, is absorbed into the "OOC" soul, that falls into hibernation.

When the soul is dragged down this way, the receptacle can do several things. In all cases, a new higher soul is created. Ash-walker eggs, alien larvae and golem shells, among others, imprint certain memories and behaviors upon it, mostly leaving it to develop around those concepts. Ancient sleepers force those lower souls to accommodate a damaged higher soul, whose lower soul was destroyed by a faulty stasis device, which means that they may develop a personality that is quite different, though memories are largely the same (similar process can be caused by the divine, ripping out the old lower soul and placing in another, though not as many memories remain in a higher soul treated this way). Other processes, such as those caused by slime extracts, cause a higher soul to develop anew around the lower soul (though a directive of "gratitude" or "obedience" are almost universally present).

Faulty cloning device would in this context attempt to jam a lower soul inside the clone, causing it to develop a new higher soul.
When a being that went through the above process dies, it's old lower and new higher souls are re-connected to the "OOC" soul, causing it's old and new higher souls to temporarily merge, until it is cloned again. Then, the process can either repeat, with the new-old higher soul combination being re-absorbed into the "OOC" soul, or, in case of precise cloning techniques that have been recently discovered, the old higher soul returns to the Out Of Context soul, while the new higher soul is jammed into a new body with the old lower soul.


Assuming above holds true, the Syndicate would nuke the station in order to capture as many lower-higher soul combinations as possible. While most will inevitably be cloned back at Centcom, or descend into a lavaland denizen, some will be captured by the syndicate, with all their memories intact. Should this happen, the syndicate could then interrogate, torture and brainwash them at their convenience, and then kill them again, causing NT cloners to start working. The time gap wouldn't be that suspicious, because sometimes higher soul becomes inactive for short periods of time (while lower soul can connect to a new higher soul, it cannot do so on it's own, requiring a special mechanism) - an event known as "braindeadness", "Space Sleep Disorder" or, in some circles, "Disconnection" (from temporary disconnection between higher and lower souls).

TL;DR: Syndies nuke SS13 to abduct people with memories intact, to do advanced version of surgery disk at them, that "traitors" part of their soul instead of their brain.

[cacogen]

SOUL

[Omega_DarkPotato]

sus

[PKPenguin321]

removed cloners has fucked my lore