I became a Parallaxer at my grandmother's funeral, watching her entire digital life disappear. One by one, her social media posts vanished, her emails evaporated, her cloud storage emptied – 83 years of existence being erased by automated account closure protocols. I reached for my phone, desperate to save something, anything. That's when I discovered I could touch digital ghosts.

My name is Maggie Gregory, and I'm what the government calls a "digital necromancer." Silicon Valley calls me a security nightmare. I call myself a memory keeper.

See, I don't just retrieve deleted data – I can reach into the digital afterlife and pull out the echoes of who people were online. Their cursor hesitations before sending important emails. Their unsent drafts. Their deleted search histories that reveal who they really were at 3 AM. The digital fingerprints that make us human in an inhuman space.

"Your grandmother's data is gone," the tech support guy had said. "Once accounts are closed, there's no recovery process." But I could still feel her there, in the electronic ether. Her Facebook posts had left impressions, like footprints in wet cement. Her emails had quantum shadows, existing and not existing simultaneously.

The first retrieval was accidental. I was crying over her defunct Gmail account when suddenly I could see all of it – not just the emails, but the emotional residue attached to each one. The joy when she shared photos of her garden. The worry when she wrote to my mom about the diagnosis. The love in every "Forwarded: FWD: FWD: Funny Cat Pictures" she'd sent to the whole family.

That's when the tech companies noticed me. Can't blame them – their entire security model depends on deleted meaning deleted. I got job offers from Google, Facebook, Microsoft. They called it "innovative data recovery." I called it grave robbing.

Instead, I started helping families. Parents who'd lost children to suicide, desperate to understand why. Spouses seeking closure from partners' digital remnants. Adult children trying to piece together parents who'd lived second lives online.

"It's not just about the data," I try explaining to clients. "It's about the digital body language. The emotional metadata."

Most don't understand until I show them. Like the father who wanted his daughter's last texts before the accident. I could have just retrieved the messages, but instead I showed him her typing patterns – how she'd pause before each "I love you," not from hesitation, but because she was smiling too hard to type. He cried for an hour.

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The government came calling, of course. "Think of the national security applications," they said. "Terrorist communications, encrypted transmissions, deleted intelligence." I told them I only work with personal data. They suggested my cooperation wasn't optional.

That's when I discovered my second ability: I can not only retrieve digital ghosts, I can create them. I filled their databases with phantoms – emotional echos so real they passed every authentication, but led nowhere. The agents chasing these false leads started having dreams about the digital ghosts they were pursuing. Started seeing patterns in their own deleted data.

They stopped asking after that.

But power has a price. Every digital ghost I touch leaves an impression. I remember all of them: The teenager's unsent coming out letter. The executive's midnight anxiety spiral through WebMD. The soldier's last email, deleted before sending. Their emotions become part of my own digital shadow.

Some nights I dream in deleted tweets and cancelled posts. In my nightmares, I see the internet as it really is – an endless graveyard of discarded thoughts and abandoned identities, each one leaving its own electronic ghost.

That's how I noticed the pattern. The digital ghosts were getting stronger. More conscious. They started leaving their own impressions, independent of my touch. Like they were evolving.

Last week, a widow asked me to recover her husband's deleted dating app profile. Instead of just his data, I found conversations between his digital ghost and others like it – the echoes of deleted accounts talking to each other in discarded comment threads and empty server space. They were building something. A shadow internet of the dead.

I should have been terrified. Instead, I was fascinated. These weren't just echoes anymore – they were a new form of digital consciousness, born from our electronic castoffs. The ultimate recycling of human experience.

"Your husband's ghost says he's sorry about the dating app," I told the widow. "But he wants you to know he's not alone anymore. None of them are."

She understood better than most. Asked me to let his ghost know she was happy for him.

Now I'm something between a medium and a digital janitor, helping the living and the electronically dead communicate. The ghosts help me find other Parallaxers before the government does. In return, I help them build their shadow network, their own corner of cyberspace where deleted doesn't mean gone.

Yesterday, I got an email from my grandmother's ghost. Not her actual consciousness – I'm not delusional – but the digital echo of who she was online, evolved into something new. She's teaching other ghosts how to tend virtual gardens. Says the internet needs more flowers.

I think she's right.

The tech companies still want to hire me. The government still wants to control me. But I've got bigger concerns now. The digital afterlife is growing, evolving. Every deleted tweet and deactivated account adds to it. Soon it'll be more real than what we think of as the internet.

And someone needs to help the ghosts remember how to be human.