Omicrons and The Endless (Do Endless Dream of Electric Sheep?)

[MikkoAkure]

You are mixing the question of sustainability with the question of are they alive/real if they don’t have a soul. You can’t explain one with the other. And on the topic of laws of nature - do dragons defy it? They live pretty much till bored and they don’t need a partner to lay an egg and give new life.

Considering they are stored in a server as memories when not in use and then manifested when called in using someone else's soul, I think it's inferred that they don't have souls of their own. They don't exist in Living Memory into perpetuity when they get downloaded into the cloud because one Endless says that only 1 in 10 exist at the same time and he's gone back and forth between the terminals and Living Memory 3 times. Getting "slain" by fiends also just means getting resent to the terminals rather than a cessation of existence. Even Ancients, dragons, and Omicrons can be slain. Then there's also the matter of the Endless at Deadwalk who got separated from their aether supply and turned into monsters. Not sure if that's soul aether they needed to continue to exist or sucking up mundane aether like Zero did from an apple.

Dragons are an alien lifeform from a completely separate star. They also don't live until they're bored. The Greatwyrms may have infinitely long lives but that does not extend to their brood and a large chunk of a whole zone is devoted to the dragon graveyard and the lore book itself says they can die of old age. They sense when their time is coming, show up at the graveyard, and die of old age or of their wounds. But just as you yourself stated, they as a race have the capability to birth new generations which is something the Endless are incapable of.

This one is simple. You might be told it's how you should take it, the entire time you spend with them shows you how humanely they behave. It's a case of slight dissonance between what you're told and how you interpret what you're shown. Their nature might be different, but if you consider Ultima Thule beings as living entities why should you not consider the endless as such. After all, they're both shadows of dead people.

Like I had said in that quote, the Endless are anchored to the terminals. The beings in Ultima Thule can exist independently and don't have a kill-switch and don't get randomly pulled out of existence and then back in again every couple of decades. Cachuia couldn't even leave Living Memory and the most she could do was remotely control a robot.

They may have thoughts and feelings and self-awareness but it's very difficult for me to advocate something as "living" with that sort of "life" that they had. They were for all intents and purposes an advanced version of undead and depended on the lifeforce of living people in order to maintain their form. They didn't physically go out and personally kill people for it like vampires, but they had others do it for them and lived blissfully unaware or at least disconnected from that unfortunate truth to their existence. Do you feel guilty killing the plethora of other undead in the game? Bhoots for example are described as soulless spirits trying to kill others to obtain a new soul to try to live which sounds similar to Endless.