Do Androids Dream: Souls Are Software Objects.  Period.  And are usually referred to as “mind-states”, unless we’re being poetic.

(There are civilizations that do not agree with this.  They are all, in subcreational terms, objectively wrong.  (And at least some of them suspect this, but it’s so much easier to be a bunch of slaving bastards when the slaves have no souls, isn’t it?)

Until it goes horribly wrong, anyway.)