Wow, Wuk Lamat is really single-handedly ruining the DT story...

[Aulainn]

What we did in Alexandria was shut down a computer. The endless are not people. It was an ai driven program wanting to kill people to fuel their version of the sims. You are trying to paint us as bad guys for seeing that...

It was a machine bringing memories back to life, memories which literally make a person as we witnessed with G'raha Tia. Imagine we managed to make bodies for these memories to inhabit without needing other peoples souls.

[Edewen]

It was a machine bringing memories back to life, memories which literally make a person as we witnessed with G'raha Tia. Imagine we managed to make bodies for these memories to inhabit without needing other peoples souls.

From my understanding.

The Alexandrians put a lot of work into separating memories from the souls. This is a stark contrast to Graha. When dealing with the first. The whole soul was transported, with the memories attached.

In this situation, it is like the soul itself is a flash drive with data on it. And Alex is literally taking peoples flash drive, reformatting it, and writing thier own data over top of it.

Even if the souls were considered alive at this point, the violation of the very core of someone being like this is probably the worst crime we have ever seen in 14. The souls, have been ripped out of the cycle of life and death, no longer dissipating into the aetherial sea to be reborn. They are more than killing peoples bodies, but preventing rebirth through the cycle of life and death.

As protectors of the source and all its reflections, we didn't go far enough. We deleted the endless. Which in theory should have allowed the souls to rejoin the cycle. But we should have razed the entire factory to dust to release those remaining souls, only drawing a line allowing the living citizens to live.

Memories are not life. The souls are. Even if we made bodies for those souls whose memories have been overwritten, all we would doing is assisting the the grossest violation in the history of ff14. Cultural understand. I understand it is wrong. Period.

[EusisLandale]

Memories are not life. The souls are.

I wouldn't say that necessarily. Memories are life, souls are what allow living.
Souls are established to just be aether like just about everything else in the setting. Functionally speaking, sucking the soul out of some random dude off the street is no different than eating a tainted apple. We know this for sure from the previous storyline.
By removing the memories from the soul all you've done is decontaminate the aether, allowing it to sustain any memory without the schizophrenic side effect.