...and the upgrade after that was a security patch for Internet Explorer.

Golems might not have reached the same pop-culture heights as vampires or zombies, but they've been repurposed and reinterpreted in a respectable breadth of series. Everywhere from Discworld to DC Comics.

Usually they're treated more-or-less like robots, in the same broad "sentient people who are artificially created, with inorganic components, and exist independently of biological needs/cycles" category. As far as I knew, nobody had written this more mystical "inextricably dependent on (the souls of) biological people to sustain their sentience" idea before But I'm A Cat Person.

Anyone have recs for something similar by now, in 2025? Drop the links in the comments!

Miranda (narrating): . . . It doesn’t work.

The prototype Beings are soulless shambles that only exist for long enough to fall apart.

So we can’t create new souls. What about tethering a golem to the ones that already exist? That does the trick. A secondhand soul is enough to run a passable Being on. In the next upgrade, they come with a self-perpetuating Contract that can sense when a connection is lost, and seek out a new one to replace it.

Bianca: “We’re so bright and so warm.”

. . . That was how Patrick put it. Or else he would put it in terms that sounded more religious than anything . . . and both of those would sure be explained by an origin like this.