Sooner or later, he did see her again, now didn't he

They did it to avert a nuclear winter.

In the race for green energy, they started cutting corners to achieve nuclear fusion before anyone else. A reactor meltdown here, an unintentional atom split there, and within years the Earth was pockmarked with unlivable land.

When one of these experiments went awry, the splitter found its mark not on an atom, but on a man - more precisely, splitting his body from his soul. The energy produced was terrific, and suddenly the ideas started flooding in. The possibilities.

They started with criminals on death row. Then people with terminal illnesses. They began harnessing all of the energy to do away with the mistakes of the past. The next snag was determining what to do with the husks. Current infrastructure couldn't exactly handle the sudden increase in the amount of dead bodies.

They found a solution, that being to periodically airlift loads of the bodies to leave behind in those dead lands. Inhumane through and through, but if you didn't think about it, it couldn't haunt you, right? The dead lands were obviously unlivable anyway, so what did it matter if it was filled with more bodies?

It quickly became apparent what the fatal flaw was: they didn't account for the will of the souls.

They did it to avert a nuclear winter. So why did the snow still come?

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My first time trying my hand at one of these - it's probably not great, but my first thought when I saw the prompt was considering exothermic and endothermic reactions; if the energy produced by splitting a body from a soul was so significant, obviously the energy consumed from a wayward soul that decided it wasn't done living bonding back into SOMETHING would be equally significant. Idunno, it was a messy stream of consciousness, and about halfway through it occurred to me this could also be a neat setup to a zombie apocalypse scenario where the damaged souls come back to their decaying bodies, both incomplete and uncertain as to what's next aside from a hunger that can't be satiated.

Maybe the zombie scenario would have been better lol

I don't have the knack for writing you all do, and I doubt anyone will see this nested under the automod, but the first idea that came to my mind seeing this prompt wasn't the effects of the massive amounts of energy created by soul fission, but the opposite

Like an exothermic reaction vs an endothermic reaction, how much energy would need to be taken back IN by wayward souls that determine that they aren't done living and bonding their way back into other living beings?

Edit: I did it anyway, it's not great but I did it