During the Greater Depression, so many people starved that the State brought in mobile crematoria. When the community destroyed those machines, it was one of the first great actions that eventually led to the independent organization of this city. The people who burned the machines and chased off the cops then went block by block (it's not like anyone had any work) to administer the last rites to the dead, each according to their custom.
Today, young people go through the great fields of the Cemetery, where countless, countless sooty stones mark graves among the tall grass. Some visit in winter or early spring, after the fall burning but before the grasses grow too tall, and there are very few paths. Some visit in late spring or summer, when prairie flowers nine feet tall flourish among the stones.
At the center of the Cemetery there is a small building, with big windows in plain white concrete walls. The young people who visit, having walked among the graves, go inside.
Sometimes they will already know a name going in; sometimes they'll talk to one of the archivists, and get a name from them.
It might be the name of a distant relative, or the name of an ancestor's neighbor. Or it might just be a name they found by chance wandering among the graves, that spoke to them somehow. Either way, having received their name and a personal access key, they will go down into the archive's underground vault. They will find a workstation and search for the person who died. They will collect, clean up, and annotate the enormous troves of data that data brokers collected on them before the Depression, read their posts, emails, and docs. Sometimes, when the archive possesses physical copies, they will go into the Stacks and find them, scan and digitize them.
Eventually, after several years (they still have their work and regular studies, so only very few do this for more than a few hours a week), they will write the story of this person. They will have learned who they had been, whom they had loved, who had loved them. They will learn just how their society betrayed and discarded them, and they will bring them back, in a little way. And someday, no-one will have been forgotten.
