Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Alleo]

Here, our choice is between prolonging the existence of these people who are so doomed they're already dead, and either actively asking to be turned off or completely unbothered by the prospect, versus the actual ongoing lives of everyone else in the universe. There's no real choice to be made, just a grim but necessary task before us.

And at the end keeping them "alive" would have just postponed their destruction anyway, since there is no unlimited power source for them. So bascially its just: End them now when the sacrificies are still low or end them when everyone else in the universe is death on top.

4.) Emet Selch was a racist.

While you are right, that Emet Selch thought we really weren't alive, it was because he thought we were inferior. His whole talk about how we're "insects" mirrored similar views that people have used to justify genocide in real life. Since even if our souls were less dense than his, we still had souls. We were still alive based on all definitions of life, in universe.

Being tempered aside I think he also wanted to believe that we are inferior because it would make it easier to just destroy all these shards and cause all these conflicts on the source. It would be a bit strange for him to sire children with people from the source if he truly believed us to be not alive.

Anyway the Ascians have always planned to sacrifice the remaining people on the source after everything is fully rejoined so genocide was always on the menu.

In the end the NPCs in living memories are bascially stuck in a neverending dream, where most cant even leave the zone they are assigned to and have to live through the same stuff again and again. One of the children even says that he has seen that performance 50 times and that it bores him. A lot of the stuff is also not working anymore and a lot of the memories are stored because they are missing the energy to keep them out the whole time. So these people are bascially at the whim of the system and can be locked away for decades/centuries and they know all of this and still dont really care. They are not angry about it. Just as not a single one react in any way when the world around them starts to turn off. For the whole times the only ones truly feeling at least a bit alive where the ones we had a personal connection to. And even those where all like: Yeah please delete us. Even Otis, who swore to protect his country.

[Bright-Flower]

I don't think the Emet comparison really holds water. If you look at it on a surface level sure you can seen parallels but that requires looking at the differing circumstances between sundered life and living memory.

When doing the side quests, even these people we interact with that don't want to go yet feel like lost souls, ghosts clinging to some unfinished business and peacefully passing on once we resolve it for them. I know they aren't actually ghosts but that's what they feel like in how they act and speak. Ghosts that just need a final act of kindness to move on.

Even Otis, who swore to protect his country.

For Otis this is probably made much easier because his country still exists. Living Memory is not the nation and people of alexandria. It's just the uploaded memories of the dead. The people are still alive and well, and with their land fused onto the Source and with the potential to even leave the bubble if they want, and not being held to task for what happened with Sphene and Zarool Ja, all in all have it pretty good right now.