Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-27186569-20170521134631/@comment-3284606-20170921070640

For my money...

Penny is 100% machine, with an original soul and mind not transferred from an organic donor. Reasoning: RWBY is based heavily on the concept of individuality, with souls being an expression of a person's uniqueness. That suggests that (A) one soul in Remnant being a knockoff or direct propagation of another is unlikely, and (B) a personality probably cannot be rewritten into a different personality without losing the soul, and Penny's personality was entirely consistent with being a machine preloaded with the basics of social interaction and equipped to figure out the rest in practice.

Penny can be resurrected, provided that her brain equivalent is not destroyed. Reasoning: It's not damage to a person's body that kills them, it's the fact that wrecking the body cuts support to the brain, and the human brain rapidly breaks down if it loses power. But Penny's brain is a computer, and computers can be unplugged and left that way indefinitely with no hardware damage and little or no data loss. In theory, if her body is repaired, her brain, personality and soul should all start back up no problem.