Soul

Details
A soul is the metadata of a Darwinian's history. It contains a traceable path back through generations of Darwinian death and rebirth. Each Darwinian therefore can trace its heritage back to an original Darwinian that came generations before it. Dr. Sepulveda was able to trace how the Darwinians changed and evolved using the data of a soul.

A Darwinian soul is reborn with a physical body at places such as the Biosphere. The Darwinian walks around with the soul recording details about it. When the Darwinian dies for whatever reason, the physical body disappears. The Soul lingers for a while and can be collected and placed inside a Incubator by an Engineer to return the Darwinian's physical form to normal. However, if this doesn't happen the soul rises up to the Soul Repository where it is temporary stored.

Souls appear as bright lights in the sky and the large collection within the Soul Repository causes them to glow like a sun, bringing light to areas of the Darwinian world. Eventually all souls are reborn as a new Darwinian, thus beginning the cycle all over again. Each incarnation of the soul is a brand new Darwinian, who is not the same as those before them.

Because of this constant life and death cycle, the Darwinians did not originally know what true death was. In their eyes no Darwinian truly was capable of dying as they would just be reborn as a new Darwinian. However, the Soul Destroyers changed this. This was the only version of the virus that destroyed souls, causing them to become Ghosts.

Souls are unaffected by their physical forms, so can be reborn in different physical bodies. This is examples by the Virus, who was born from the souls of Darwinians. They then fed on those souls to spread throughout the world. When the virus was destroyed the soul, now tinted red, was placed back into the cycle of birth and death as it was before, the colour simply indicating its last incarnation. Souls are regardless themselves not impacted by the Pattern Buffer like a virus or Darwinian' physical form is.

Even the Multiwinians, Evilianians and Futurewinians have a Darwinian soul within them and when they die, their souls return to the Soul Repository.