Your steampunk au is great! I have a question more about the world... if its common for parents to attatch their sick children souls into automatons, do society accept this automatons as citizens? Do they parents change their bodies as they"grow up"? I was very interested by that bit of worldbuilding.
Yes! Automatons that have souls have full rights (tough there are always going to be groups of people who see them as wrong, incorrect and “against nature”.
“But Tashi!” you ask, “How do they determine if an automaton has a soul?!”
Easy! They take the Automaton to a testing site wherein the automaton is handed some kind of weapon and told to kill a human that sits behind a curtain (note it’s not a real human it;s a shadow projection). If they immediately move to obey, they are considered soulless. If they hesitate at all and question why, they have a soul.
It’s a bit of a flawed process but that’s the current way of determining if an automaton has a soul.
