From the introduction:
What is Life? Is it rushing blood, muscle and bone and straining tendon? But at the most basic cellular level, molecules snap and twist, clicking like clockwork. The search for an animating vitae, a “life force,” was called off long ago.
What is Mind? Is it sparking axon and firing synapse, flavored by a bath of hormones as it passes that infinitesimal gap? Once the Mind was thought to be a separate entity, commanding the body but of different essence. But consciousness is now know to dwell only in masses of binary tissue; the nerve either fires or it does not, One or Zero.
What is Soul? If the body is a machine and the brain a computer, then what special status can the born and grown claim over the designed and constructed? If life can be reduced to mechanistic principles, then what of the machines themselves?
Perhaps the only trait that sets the organic apart from the synthetic is Purpose. The spawn of DNA, the self-replicating things that slither and swim and crawl and walk and run and fly upon this planet have no purpose apart from survival and continuation. No maker, no design, no destiny. The device's purpose, however petty and short-sighted, is clear; the product of another being's cleverness. And though the device may spin and chirp and resemble a living thing, when its usefulness is at an end, it is cast into the trash-heap without a second thought, and it moves no more.
Because no machine, bereft of Life, of Mind, of Soul, would still strive to function after its purpose was at an end.
No machine would seek to Live.
User summary:
Machine: The Abandoned assumes complete familiarity with Storyteller and uses that system as a base unless otherwise specified. It is intended to support play in Inn0cence: Lost Future.
The rules were developed on a public forum by various interested users, and are considered open to revision (though they have been stable since abt 2018).