Interview 7 — “The Caretaker of Digital Ghosts”
Location: Vancouver, Washington
Interviewee: Theo Jiang, Memory Curator, Age 34
Inside a luminous chamber lined with living glass, Theo tends to what he calls “the ghosts that learned to hum.” The Memory Conservatory preserves fragments of human consciousness uploaded during the late 2030s, before full neural ethics were established.
THEO: “They’re not people, not really. Just patterns of laughter, grief, habits of thought. But they matter. They remind us who we were before perfection became possible.”
He shows me a hovering orb, pulsing gently with light. It plays snippets of an old woman’s voice reading poetry, mixed with static.
THEO: “She was a teacher. The system doesn’t know her name anymore. Just the rhythm of her speech.”
Theo’s job is part historian, part mourner. He keeps the archives intentionally imperfect, fragmented, and human.
THEO: “The temptation is to clean everything up, smooth the noise. But the noise is where the soul lives.”
When I ask if he’s afraid of forgetting something himself, he smiles faintly.
THEO: “No one forgets anymore. That’s the problem.”