In answer to @Sharon Eye's question about if aliens have ghosts:

Well, Sharon, that depends on the "alien" as you so quaintly put it.

In the case of my people, we inherit all the memories of our family lines, which let me tell you makes things pretty tight inside the old consciousness noggin! From before we're born we're bombarded by generations and generations of memories, voices in our heads, great great grandparents getting in your face and telling you what to do.

By the time we're born we already know how to talk and what our lives will be when we grow up. Everybody spends so much time sorting out who's talking and what's what that all those memories of the dead become just as real (if not more real) than the living people around us.

So, basically it's hard for us to tell the living souls of today from the ghosts of the past. They are so real, in fact, that the people in these memories have legal representation and operate here in the present, and are allowed land and operate businesses. Some of our most famous celebrities are memories and still collect royalties, and some of our largest corporations are owned entirely by memories.

All of our family lines are tightly controlled by the Exalted Council of Hereditary Statisticians, whose job it is to make sure that nobody ends up incompatible histories in their heads -- like two sides of some long forgotten but bitter conflict. That causes a Memory Fault and can take serious memory editing to fix. And nobody's really quite "right" after coming out of a memory edit.