Board Thread:Mortal Kombat (Alternate Timeline)/@comment-26050254-20161107025545/@comment-21005855-20170221173215

The way it was described, Smoke's memories, experience, and powers were downloaded by the Lin Kuei and put into either a cyborg body or just put into the databanks of the Lin Kuei Cyber Initiative. I would imagine that's how they did it at first just in case they had to kill the original.