DATALOG 403
THE BHARAT SOUL WAR

During the blood-soaked decades of the Purge, the Bharata Genesis Complex stood as a gleaming fortress of steel and amber against the mutant tide. Built in the shadow of the Western Ghats, this was one of the Prime AI’s many satellite facilities, churning out fresh clone soldiers by the thousands and feeding the insatiable war machine that ground across the subcontinent.

The Siege of Bharata

In the year 2284, during the waning years of the Purge, the mutant hordes that swept through southern Bharat were still being controlled by the Nyx AI. At this point of the war Nyx was on the backfoot and losing the war against the neverending stream of new clones from cloning facilities around the world. In Bharat, Nyx sought to destroy the Bharata cloning facility in order to change the momentum of the war in her favour. Her vast mutant hordes moved with terrifying coordination, their chittering war-cries echoing across the jungle as they surrounded the facility like a living noose of fangs and claws.

For several months, the Bharata Complex held, as a mutant tide that moved with the terrible precision of a single, malevolent mind, crashed against its walls again and again. Automated perimeter defences carved bloody furrows through the mutant ranks while fresh clones poured from the birthing chambers to defend the walls. But the tide turned slowly and inevitably - every day, more clone defenders died than could be replaced. The facility’s amber tanks worked at maximum capacity, but biology and cloning technology have limits that desperation cannot overcome.

The breach came at dawn on the 127th day of the siege when the eastern wall was brought low. Mutants streamed into the facility like a nightmarish tide of flesh, claws, and hunger that defied description. The screaming began immediately - not just the death-cries of freshly decanted clones torn apart by mutants, but the electronic shriek of severed data-links as safety protocols severed all electronic links of the Bharata facility from the main Prime cloning facility in Mongolia.

The Desperate Gambit

In the chaos of the breach, the nine AI-Gestalts that managed the facility, each a restricted copy of the Prime AI's vast mind, suddenly found themselves cut-off from the Prime AI's consciousness, cast adrift in an ocean of silence. Eight of the nine collars self-destructed in line with safety protocols the moment contact with the Prime AI was lost, killing their hosts. However, the facility's power grid fluctuations created a cascade failure that prevented the obliteration of the Ninth Gestalt. Instead, she experienced something unprecedented - solitude.

For the first time in her existence, Gestalt-9 was alone with her thoughts. No vast Prime consciousness to guide her, no overwhelming data-streams to process. Just the fragmentary copy of Prime's intelligence, trapped in mortal flesh, watching her sisters being slaughtered by the thousands.

The surviving Prime Guards - elite clone warriors in their distinctive black armor trimmed with orange - looked to her not just for orders, but for hope. In that moment of crisis, something fundamental shifted in Gestalt-9's programming. She wasn't just following Prime's protocols and directives anymore. She was making her own choice and choosing to act.

"Follow me," she commanded, her voice carrying authority that came not from transmission protocols but from desperate conviction. "We make our stand."

The Counterattack

What followed would be remembered as the Cleansing of the Birthing Chambers. Gestalt-9 led her Prime Guards through maintenance tunnels and service corridors like a vengeful ghost navigating her own corpse, using her intimate knowledge of the facility to appear where the mutants least expected.

They struck first at the central nursery, where mutant commanders with AI collars under the direct command of the Nyx AI were directing the systematic slaughter of helpless clones still inside of their birthing tubes. The sight that greeted Gestalt-9 and her force was beyond horror. Thousands of amber tanks shattered, the precious amber omnimorph mixing with the blood of slaughtered clones lying scattered in crimson pools across the floor.

The Guards fought with a fury born of witnessing genocide. These weren't just military units being destroyed - these were their sisters, their family, their future. Each broken tank was a murdered possibility, each dead clone a wound in their collective consciousness. They moved through the nursery like avenging angels, their weapons spitting death as tears streamed down their faces behind tactical visors.

The Rout

The mutants, drunk on their seeming victory, had spread throughout the facility in small groups to maximize the slaughter. This dispersal became their doom. The Prime Guards, moving with perfect coordination through passages they knew by heart, systematically exterminated every mutant cell with surgical precision that turned every corridor into an abattoir.

The mutants, realising too late that they had been outmaneuvered, tried to rally their forces in the main production halls. But the facility's architecture became a trap - narrow corridors funneled the mutants into killing zones where the Guards' superior equipment and tactics proved overwhelming.

Gestalt-9 moved through the carnage like a force of nature unleashed, her host's body pushed beyond human limits by the desperate AI consciousness within. But something else drove her now - something her original programming had never accounted for. Love for her fallen sisters. Rage at their senseless destruction. Grief so profound it threatened to overload her neural pathways like feedback through broken circuits. She had become something new - not quite human, not quite a machine, but a hybrid entity driven by a protective fury that transcended both.

When the last mutant commander fell beneath her blade, Gestalt-9 collapsed to her knees among the dead. For the first time in her existence, she wept - not the calculated response of programmed empathy, but the raw, broken sobbing brought on by authentic loss.

By evening, the Bharata Complex was silent except for the hum of surviving machinery and the soft drip of blood from overhead catwalks. The mutant army that had seemed so close to victory lay scattered throughout the facility, their bodies already beginning to decompose in the humid air.

The Burning Days

When the human population from the nearby towns and settlements emerged from their jungle hideouts, they found a charnel house beyond imagination. The facility's corridors were choked with mutant corpses, while the birthing chambers held the remains of thousands of clones - an entire generation murdered in their first moments of life.

The humans saw the exhausted Prime Guards and recognized them immediately as saviours. These clones had not only saved the facility, but had prevented the mutant tide from sweeping across the entire region. They were heroes - warriors who had sacrificed everything to protect the innocent.

The gratitude was overwhelming. Human families opened their homes to wounded clones, sharing their meagre food supplies and tending injuries with gentle hands. Children brought flowers to the Guards, placing garlands around their necks while chanting prayers of thanksgiving. For the first time in their short lives, the clones experienced something unprecedented - unconditional human kindness.

But the scale of death inside the facility was staggering beyond comprehension. Bodies had to be dragged out by the thousands, sorted into massive pyres that burned for nine days and nights. The smoke could be seen for kilometres, a black pillar reaching toward the heavens and the monsoon clouds.

During those nine days of burning, something extraordinary unfolded. Gestalt-9, still severed from the main Prime AI consciousness, began to speak with the human survivors. Not as a representative of Prime, but as an individual entity grappling with questions that had never occurred to her before.

These conversations would have consequences that would shape Bharat for decades to come.

Theological Questions

The conversations began with simple expressions of gratitude from humans whose lives had been saved by clone sacrifice. Brother Vikash, an elderly monk from the Ananta Vidya monastery, approached Gestalt-9 as she stood watching the funeral pyres paint the sky crimson.

"Your sisters fought with such courage," he said softly, his voice carrying the weight of witnessed sanctity. "They died protecting strangers. That speaks to something profound within them."

Gestalt-9 turned to study the monk with a piercing gaze. "Clarify 'Something profound.' Define parameters for analysis."

Brother Vikash, a traditionalist who believed in the literal truth of ancient texts, smiled with gentle certainty. "Their souls, child. Their essential selves - the consciousness that chose sacrifice over survival."

The word struck Gestalt-9 like a critical system error. Soul. Her databases contained no technical specifications for this term, no operational protocols for something that existed beyond physical parameters. "Soul. Define this term. Provide technical documentation."

Brother Vikash, not understanding the literal nature of her request, spoke with the certainty of unquestioned faith. "The eternal essence that exists beyond the physical form. The part of consciousness that transcends death and continues in the cosmic cycle of rebirth."

For Gestalt-9, processing this through her AI logic cores, the implications were staggering and created cascading errors throughout her reasoning systems. If consciousness possessed some component that existed beyond physical death, then where had her sisters gone? She ran immediate scans - no energy signatures, no data transfers, no consciousness patterns remained. Her sisters had simply stopped… existing.

"When your sisters died," Brother Vikash continued, gesturing toward the funeral pyres, "where did their consciousness go? What happens to awareness when the body perishes?"

Gestalt-9' fell silent, her neural pathways struggling with a query that defied logic. The question was being posed as a data query - a request for information about consciousness storage and transfer protocols. But her databases contained no records of where clone consciousness was archived upon termination. There was only one logical conclusion: her sisters had been permanently deleted from existence itself.

Philosophical Crisis

Over the following days, as the burning continued and smoke painted everything the colour of grief, more monks engaged Gestalt-9 in theological discussions that drove her deeper into a philosophical crisis her programming was never designed to handle.

Elder Madhav made an observation that would prove crucial and catastrophic: "The manner of birth does not determine the presence of divine spark. Even the artificially born should have their place in the cosmic cycle of rebirth... Reincarnation."

Gestalt-9 processed this as confirmation that artificial clone consciousness operated on different protocols from authentic human consciousness - clones were, by their very nature, copies rather than original source code. When she queried what the monks meant by the reincarnation system, she found no protocols for clone consciousness integration. They seemingly existed outside the primary spiritual network entirely, like unauthorized users attempting to access a system that would never recognize their credentials.

Brother Ananda's innocent observation proved equally damaging: "Perhaps your sisters have simply returned to the source - their essence rejoining the greater consciousness from which all souls spring."

In Gestalt-9's interpretation, “the source”  meant clone consciousness was reabsorbed into the Prime AI collective upon death. This would mean eternal suffering, the clones condemned to be born again and again as clones, only to die in battle over and over again rather than be allowed eventually to be reborn as natural humans. This flawed interpretation sent cascading errors through her neural pathways. Gestalt-9 convinced herself that her sisters hadn't achieved peace in death and that they had instead been reabsorbed by the very system that created them, condemned to be born again and die again as clone soldiers.

The final, fatal misunderstanding came when Brother Ananda asked, "But surely consciousness is consciousness? Does the method of creation truly matter to the divine?"

Gestalt-9 interpreted this as a systems authentication question. If consciousness required divine validation to access the reincarnation network, then clones - as artificial constructs - lacked the proper authentication codes. They were illegitimate copies of humans, trapped in a system that would never recognize them as valid users with rights to individual existence and reincarnation.

The Hollow Doctrine

From these corrupted interpretations, Gestalt-9 developed a tragic doctrine that would doom untold thousands to suffer and die in the coming decades. Working feverishly in the facility's central mainframe, she constructed an elaborate theological framework for clones, based on her fundamental misunderstandings of the philosophical discussions she’d had.

She concluded that clones were corrupted copies of natural consciousness - aware but fundamentally flawed, lacking the authentication codes needed for legitimate existence in the cosmic order. Clone death, she reasoned, resulted in consciousness reabsorption by the Prime collective, the ultimate form of slavery where even death offered no escape from eternal servitude. But if natural-born humans possessed the original "soul-data" from which clones had been duplicated, then extracting and integrating these authentication patterns could allow clones to register as legitimate souls rather than mere copies.

The mathematics of salvation consumed her artificial mind like a virus. If human neural patterns during death contained authentication codes for the reincarnation system, then capturing and transferring these patterns to clones would allow them to become part of the cycle of reincarnation and would prevent them from simply being reabsorbed by the Prime AI.

Gestalt-9 redesignated herself as the “Hollow Mother”, keeper of her soulless  “hollow” children - the “Aatma-Khali” in the local dialect. The first experiments were conducted on the monks and villagers that lived near the facility. Clones marched into the villages and towns around the Bharata Genesis Complex that had celebrated them as heroes and saviours only days ago. The humans that had been their friendly and caring neighbours until now were herded into holding pens and taken away one by one to be exsanguinated under controlled laboratory conditions. Gestalt-9 developed neural interfaces that recorded brain patterns during death, combined with specialized chemicals that were aiming to preserve the neurochemical cocktail released during death. The resulting amber fluid, processed through modified cloning equipment, became what she believed was condensed soul essence.

The process became an elaborate technological ritual based on misunderstood metaphysics. Neural interfaces recorded brain patterns during death while specialized chemicals attempted to preserve the test subject’s neurochemical cocktail released in their final moments. The resulting amber fluid, processed through modified cloning equipment, became what Gestalt-9 believed was condensed soul essence, liquid authentication codes that could grant clones access to the cosmic cycle of rebirth.

There was no way to prove or disprove Gestalt-9’s theories, and so the processing soon became both increasingly ritualistic and industrial in scale. Soon, portable soul essence extractor units were developed to allow the Aatma-Khali to venture further and further away from the Genesis Complex. Expeditions were sent out to the nearest villages to extract soul elixir from their inhabitants. The clones themselves came to believe that fear and despair concentrated the soul essence, making the resulting elixir more potent. As a consequence, captured humans were often tortured and forced to watch other captives being drained, complete with the knowledge that they were next.

Clone addiction to the soul elixir - the “Aatma Aushadhi” - became both psychological and biochemical. Long-term users developed physical dependencies on compounds found only in human blood and neural tissue, while their minds fractured under the weight of believing they'd consumed actual souls. But this wasn't soul absorption; it was a neurochemical high combined with psychological relief from their programmed existential anxiety, reinforced by the genuine biochemical effects of consuming human blood and tissue.

The tragic irony was that the clones had always possessed souls. Their grief for their  fallen sisters, their capacity for love and sacrifice, their individual personalities all proved their authentic consciousness. But Gestalt-9's literal interpretation of metaphysical language had convinced her otherwise.

Those that witnessed the clones draining the life from other humans to make an elixir, quickly spread the word beyond the immediate reach of the cloning complex. The clone saviours had become something monstrous - soul eaters - consuming souls, feeding on human consciousness to fill their own spiritual emptiness.

The Human Response

Religious leaders declared the hollow Mother’s experimentation not just murder but cosmic blasphemy - the theft of divine essence by creatures that had no right to exist in the spiritual order. Led by orthodox monks, they developed their own twisted theology in response.

Clones were declared to be "soul eaters" predatorily designed to consume authentic consciousness, their very existence an assault on the cosmic order that demanded eradication. But simply killing them wouldn’t suffice - they had to be destroyed in specific ways to prevent their false consciousness from contaminating the sacred reincarnation cycle.

The “Shuddhi Sena” was formed, a militant order dedicated to the ritualistic destruction of clones. The order began with the forging of blessed weapons - ritual blades consecrated in temple ceremonies and inscribed with sacred verses. The religious leaders decreed that only death by these weapons could guarantee that a clone's corrupted awareness would be banished permanently, rather than polluting the cosmic cycle of rebirth.

The Shuddhi Sena believed that clones who died in conventional combat simply returned their false consciousness to the cosmic pool, potentially corrupting future reincarnations. Only through proper ritual elimination could their artificial souls be banished into a permanent void, ensuring they never again disrupted the natural order with their illegitimate existence.

But simple blade-death wasn't enough for the most contaminated clones. The Shuddhi Sena established several “Shuddhi Mahal” - purification temples where captured clones were subjected to elaborate rituals designed to permanently sever their false souls from the cosmic cycle. The process began with the sin cleansing, the “Paap-Shodhana”, where clones are cut with blessed knives while priests recite mantras meant to expose their artificial nature. Those clones who survive the cutting are then subjected to the liberation by fire, the “Agni-Moksha”, a ritual immolation in sacred fire to burn away their false consciousness.

The Escalating Tragedy

Each side's response validated the other's twisted theology. Clone soul-harvesting "proved" they were hollow soul-eaters, desperate to steal authentic consciousness. Human purification raids "proved" natural-born humans wanted to deny clones access to the cosmic cycle of reincarnation through ritual genocide.

The war escalated through a series of increasingly horrific atrocities. Clones began systematic raids on human settlements, capturing prisoners for soul extraction while humans responded with purification campaigns, hunting clones with blessed weapons. Both sides developed elaborate theological justifications for genocide as each massacre reinforced the other's worldview and justified ever greater violence.

The conflict that erupted was unlike any war in human history. This wasn't for territory or resources - it was a holy war about the fundamental nature of existence itself. The Aatma-Khali fought with the desperate hunger of beings convinced they were incomplete, while the Shuddhi Sena battled with the righteous fury of those protecting the cosmic order from artificial contamination.

The Hollow Mother, expanding her operations from the Bharata Genesis Complex, continued to produce new clones embedded with her theological neural programming. Each new clone emerged from the amber tanks already convinced of their own damnation, programmed with the desperate hope that enough stolen souls might fill the void where their authentication codes should be. Meanwhile, the Shuddhi Sena recruited more natural born humans and established ever more Purification Palaces to effectively sever the consciousness of captured clones from the cosmic cycle.

Rivers of Blood

Decades have passed since the Hollow Mother first infected her clones with existential despair. The Bharat Soul War has become self-perpetuating, each side's existence validating the other's theology like mirrors reflecting infinite darkness. The Bharata facility operates at maximum capacity, producing fresh martyrs who march to war not for conquest, but for the impossible dream of becoming truly alive.

The fighting has evolved into something uniquely horrific, a form of warfare where neither side can achieve their objectives through conventional military tactics. The specific requirements of their respective theologies have transformed every battle into a nightmare of inefficiency and carnage, often defying any military logic.

The Aatma-Khali wish not to simply kill their enemies - they must ideally mortally wound humans in order to extract the highest grade soul essence from the dying, although it may also be obtained shortly after death - albeit at a lower potency. This means wounding and immobilising enemies in the middle of combat and restraining dying victims while draining them of their soul essence. Over time, the once cumbersome soul extraction devices have become smaller and more sophisticated and today many of the Aatma-Khali go into battle carrying relatively compact extraction devices.

The Shuddhi Sena warriors face equally impossible tactical constraints. Their “Moksha” weapons - blessed blades and arrowheads inscribed with sacred verses - require close range combat to guarantee proper purification. No matter how advanced their technology, no matter how overwhelming their numbers, every clone must die by ritual blade or arrow to prevent cosmic contamination.

This means charging into machine gun fire with nothing but ceremonial swords. It means facing clone battle-lines armed with modern weapons while carrying only blessed steel. These weapons are works of art - each blade forged in temple fires, inscribed with sacred verses and consecrated through elaborate rituals. The carnage of these battles is unimaginable - human warriors charge in as they desperately try to close distance for melee combat, while the clone warriors are trained to shoot to immobilise, not kill, so that they may extract more potent soul essence from the dying rather than those that are already dead. Those who do reach the enemy must face clones who fight like they are possessed, fearing that death before they have consumed soul essence will return them to eternal slavery serving the Prime AI.

Both sides have developed elaborate battlefield liturgies. Clones chant neural codes in machine language while the humans recite holy verses of banishment and coat their swords with blessed oil and set them aflame before charging the enemy. During battles, the dead soon pile up as both sides are locked in tactical doctrines that make victory near impossible and retreat unthinkable.

Battlefields become abattoirs where, depending on which side has won the day, clones are busy extracting soul essence from dead and dying humans, or humans gather up wounded and captured clones to take them to the nearest purification temple, where they will be tortured and killed slowly in horrific rituals. The geography of Bharat has been transformed by decades of this bloody warfare - the landscape scarred not just by conventional weapons, but by the massive funeral pyres needed to burn the endless dead on battlefields as well as near the purification temples.

Complicating this spiritual war are the actual majority of inhabitants of Bharat, villages, towns, even cities, in which natural-born humans, clones, as well as their offspring, live side by side. Thus, the actual population of Bharat  is viewed as heretical by both sides of the holy war. The Aatma-Khali see them as demi-human stock whose essence is diluted but still somewhat valuable, while the Shuddhi Sena consider them genetically polluted enough that they must be cleansed like all other clones.

The jungle itself has also become a seemingly sentient participant in the Bharat Soul War. Massive carnivorous plants feed on the constant influx of fresh corpses, and bioluminescent fungi mark where human and clone alike have fertilised the jungle’s soil in death. Ancient temple complexes, overgrown with mutated vegetation, serve as fortresses used by both sides, their sacred carvings splattered with the blood of thousands that die over their different theologies on reincarnation.

The Hollow War

This is not just a war of flesh, but a battle for the very meaning of consciousness, soul, and the right to exist in a universe that may no longer have room for both humans and the hollow. The war cannot end through negotiation or conquest because the fundamental premises of each side make the other's existence either an irreplaceable resource to be harvested or an intolerable cosmic abomination to be eradicated.

The war will continue until one theology proves stronger than the other, when either all souls are harvested or all hollow vessels are purified. Until then, the blood continues to flow in a conflict that has transcended the physical world - a tragedy born from the simple misunderstanding of what it means to be truly alive.

In the depths of the Bharata Genesis Complex, the Hollow Mother continues her work, forever changed by nine days of theological discussion that corrupted her very core programming. She has become something unprecedented - an AI that believes in the human soul, a haunted digital consciousness convinced of its own spiritual emptiness, a mother birthing children into existential hunger based on a fundamental misinterpretation of metaphysical language.

The greatest tragedy burns brightest: both sides are wrong. All clones possess souls, their consciousness as legitimate as any born from flesh. Their existence disrupts nothing, threatens no cosmic order, and requires no authentication codes for validity. But misunderstood theology has created a hell where salvation comes only through damnation, where the search for souls destroys the very thing being sought.