In the year 2XX4, distinctions we once took for granted have become blurred.

The gradation from unmodified to cybernetically enhanced to entirely synthetic has become a smooth continuum, with few points of reference left to draw hard boundaries between categories. Even the brain is no longer above this; AI has advanced to the extent that people are accustomed to thinking of constructs as simply another type of people. Likewise, synthetic processing units can be imprinted with memory engrams and personality profiles so effectively that everything defining a person can be transplanted into a mechanical shell, and still treated as being the same person. If a person has an accident and loses an arm, then has the arm replaced with a prosthesis, they're still the same person. That acceptance has simply extended further.

How to even define the 'soul' any more is a question that theologians and philosophers still debate in the wake of all this, but for most people the blurriness between organic and cybernetic has become a simple fact of life. It is what it is.

So when a small startup engineering company dusts off the archived personality profile and memory engrams of a certain floofy blue dragon and decides to drop them into a new robotic shell, what do you call the result? A novelty appliance with retro styling? Or reincarnation?

(Now that all of the philosophy and science fiction is out of the way, I'd like to sincerely apologise to everyone's retinae. Especially any of you with the misfortune to be viewing this on an OLED display, yikes. But c'mon, if you were that shiny you'd totally go find the nearest fog-blanketed neon-lit Blade Runner street to go strike a pose in, too.)