A talking casket was cringe, a touring crypt an oxymoron, and living with your father on an RV so old it could still run on gas was a circle Dante had been too appalled to mention. That had been Jane's life since her tenth birthday. They went from dying town to dying town following a secret algorithm running behind her father's eyes. By unspoken law they only traveled at night. As soon as they entered a new town her father always drove directly to some park-like space strangely available and implausibly devoid of cameras or cops. As Jane's understanding of those aspects of the world deepened so did the mystery of this dispensation. They worked quickly and smoothly and the thirteen caskets in their trailer would be unpacked and arranged under the black tent before the first sunrise.
Then, after letting their floating sign rise and setting up advertising bots in whatever networks the locals favored, Jane and her father slept in the RV through the day. Jane could not remember the last time she had been awake from sunrise to sundown instead of the other way around.
There was seldom more than a handful of people in their first open night but never less than one. It didn't matter how many or whom. The next night there would be more, and by the seventh night — they never stayed longer and seldom less — around a hundred people would have entered the tent to talk with the dead inside. Most of them would be old people who remembered when things you could talk with, things that sounded like people and even people you knew, had been a new thing under the sun. In the rare town that still had young people, as a rule bored and unfamiliar with hope, they would go to make fun of a past they couldn't punish or to ask questions they didn't know the words for.
Jane didn't know the names of the people inside the caskets. Her father had removed the plaques and convinced the voices to never answer that question. She was almost sure one of them was her grandfather but she couldn't have said why. The caskets whispered through the night when she was alone with them but they had never said anything about who they had been. It was a small RV and her father spoke in his sleep too. He sounded very much like them and like them everything he said was from a past she had no understanding or use for.
Once she saw a man walk backwards out of the tent, bone-white and mouth open. He had turned around to look at her father without really letting the tent's entrance out of his sight. The man and Jane's father had looked at each other for a meaningless minute and then the man ran. That was one of the few times they left a town before their seventh night. Jane's father had said nothing but she thought she saw something like a counter being updated in her father's algorithm.