Avatar

Avatars, known as OwnShips in technical fields like Law or Metathaumatics, are the bodies controlled by a resurrected human mind. A biological avatar, also known as a Khet or a Sapiens, is a physical body with extensive alterations to a person's DNA to grant them eternal biological life. A sophiological avatar is probably composed of ideas made manifest, rather than immortalized flesh. One should note that the sale of custom sophiological avatars means that biometrics such as fingerprinting, voice recognition, eye-scanning and DNA evidence are all less useful than they were in the Old Real. The result is that SAMs like Psychometry or Parcelmaster are heavily employed by police forensic teams.

History
Biological avatars are a modern name for a very old concept. Ancient Egyptian resurrections were the first to apply a name for the biologically-immortal bodies which were only momentarily retained after resurrection; the word Khet, derived from an Ancient Egyptian term meaning "a person's physical body as part of their soul", was repurposed to describe the biological body. While Khet is a common slang term still, the most common name currently used for a biological body is a Sapiens (from "Homo sapiens").

Sophiological avatars will often come with minor abilities and visual attributes, which are used to classify "species" of avatars like Furries, Vampires or Toons. Such abilities, which have been referred to as Quirks since the 16th Century, are like pseudo-SAMs due to being based on ideas rather than biological traits. People have been trying to understand the means by which a Sapiens is able to affect the New Real with mental output beyond placebo effect for centuries, with mysteries such as the Evil Eye or True Names only recently having made any progress toward explanations.

A sophiological avatar which was built by request is known as a Semblance, while an avatar formed from a person's psyche is known as a Soul.

Psychoneurography
A Psychoneurography is the process of drawing upon a person's self-image to form a type of sophiological avatar called a psychoneurograph by the medical community. The machine used to enact the process is called a Psychoneurogram. For all intents and purposes, self-image and the consciousness is the soul, with a psychoneurography always giving the same results, regardless of a person's age or experience. As a result, a psychoneurograph is said to be the process of shedding a physical body to become a Soul, a process nicknamed "soulsearching".

Souls
A Soul's composition and existence is still a mystery.

Originally, the only hypothesis with any evidence was that the New Real is a universe made of ideas, and Souls are a simpler and more permanent idea than a biological human body, due to the fact that Souls seemed more rooted in mythology, religion and fiction than in a physical reality and that dreaming Souls always have the same form in their dreams as they do while awake.

Some say they're an artificial body made of pure energy, powered by fusion within the Soul, which is backed up by the fact that Souls emit carbon dioxide and water vapor, and produce heavy water, as waste products.

All that is known for sure is that Souls come from the psyche of the person who underwent a Soulsearch.

Souls and SAMs
Superhuman Ability Modules are actually based off of the Quirks which psychoneurographs can have. Quirks date back thousands of years, back to the end of the First War, and include the abilities that a person expects a biological being, or mythlogical or fictional character, to have. Examples include super-hearing, vampirism, toon physics, lack of a shadow, or immunity to fire. While a Soul or Semblance can have any ability which could be accomplished with technology or biology, true superpowers cannot be enabled by a Quirk.

Semblances
A custom sophiological avatar, or Semblance, is extremely expensive. As stated above, it is free of charge and comparable in quality to use self-image as input to automatically generate a sophiological avatar called a Soul. Soulsearching predates Semblances by at least 11,000 years, however the idea of the Semblance was first recorded on the walls of a cave near eGoli, in the form of a painting with no known author which dates back to before 0 GHE.

The first Semblance ever produced was the infamous False Soul, which was created by the infamous MisterGoodright to convince voters in Newton that he was a better person than he actually was. He was elected as mayor 3 times before retiring, and his deception was not revealed until many years later.

Semblances remained a trade secret for decades, merely a rumor among the populace of Gaia that "Souls can be faked for the right price". Most if not all Semblance creation was done by members of the Underworld.

The first legal Semblance studio was Edison Sophiologies, founded in 11937 GHE by Thomas Edison. Each Semblance created by the company broadcasts an RFID signal. A sophiography, normally used to get information about unconscious Souls using cell phones or a doctor's computer, can be used to detect the serial number that differentiates a Semblance from a Soul via NFC.

Waste Products
A Sophiological avatar creates very small amounts of waste, about one liter of liquid waste per year in the form of Heavy Water, as well as a negligible amount of carbon dioxide and water vapor which hasn't been measured because no one wants to keep tabs on people's farts.

Due to the production of heavy water by sophiological avatars, the Omni Processors used on Gaia are equipped with an extra subsystem so that water in the system will undergo deuterium depletion.