I very much loved this when I first saw it. My one crit, as you recall, is that it was not a great introduction to your department as a "department" and that you would be competing with the two other ghost departments for psychological space in the minds of contest-readers. As it turns out, that concern was, shall we say, premature. Fundamentally this is refreshing in how it establishes a set of rules for how ghosts works purely through implication in a way that also works neatly as a payoff. I am thinking specifically of how you establish the jargon of eidolon-class, show how that interacts with unnoticed deaths making it is unclear that the guy is even dead, and then finally all the way at the end having that bit of technobabble tie into the emotional payoff. It's elegant, really.
One must wonder of course how efficient this guy was that they continued to use him over other systems like say ENIAC or other computer systems. And this is really a major problem in many industries — the reliance on old and obsolete technologies that "work" but that are slowly gaining legacy status, becoming impossible to maintain and replace as those who knew how to work with the systems on a fundamental level age out of the profession or retire. Simply put this is a succinct and elegant metaphor for the burgeoning issue of tech debt in institutions that adopted digital record keeping technologies in the 80s and 90s and have been working off of the same core code ever since Well done.
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