In The Hall of Human Experience

This one gets a little dark. So I was playing with the idea of memory and immortality, and I wanted a place where the people of Eb tried to get some of both. The Hall of Human Experience is the place where they stored as much as they could. The Eblinites believed that they could download their memories into an external brain, which would remember everything they did at the moment of their death and as such, live on when their physical brain stopped working.

The face of the machine, such as it is, is the Mannikin. By inhabiting the body, each resident is capable of acting alive, responding to questions or carrying out conversations, even gesturing and posturing they way they might have in life (within the limitations of the Mannikin's nonorganic, relatively inflexible body). To preserve the accuracy of the archived memories, input is not recorded.

Of course, it's all a show, really. The machines are regurgitating bits of conversation and pieces of memory. They're no more themselves than these words are me. Many memories are not stored, and the way the machine retrieves memories isn't quite an accurate representation of the way humans remember things. There aren't any emotions, no fluids or chemicals to muddy the signals. Some of these connections are marked in the files, but some aren't. It's unreliable.

The files, of course, needed to be archived. Copied, backed up, stored in remotely accessible locations, retrieved, shredded, coded, pieced back together, organized and filed, so as the people of the Eb left, they left some people behind. Even one hundred years after the fall of Eb, the ghouls remain, dutifully cataloging every last file, in order to share the whole, unfiltered and accurate truth about every experience recorded by every Eblinite who ever lived.