As I looked at Arianna standing above me, her red hair flying in the wind, framed by the ruins of Harbin something clicked in my head.

Something twinkled, like a broken mirrors suddenly rearranging itself within my soul.

The face of Arianna vanished as did the city. I was amidst infinite, vast darkness. A figure emerged, stepped out from the void and offered me... his or... her hand?

The figure flickered, became more clear, turned into that of a thirteen year old girl with blue eyes and white hair wearing an orange safety vest and yellow hardhat. She smirked at me as if she knew me and winked at me.

Another shift. A woman with black hair and black eyes in a white space suit with a large W on it stared back at me curiously.

Another shift. A figure in a dark, blue-tinted, thick long coat wearing leather gloves, a captain's hat and gas mask with violet lenses. The mask was old, scratched up and its angles formed something akin to a false smile. The odd, fake smile fell apart into shifting rainbows.

A vision of a girl with brilliant, yellow eyes emerged from the chaos of floating, ghostly shards. Her hair glittered, looked like it was woven from ruby gemstones. Her impossible, crystalline mane was framed by a spinning wheel of radiant spikes made up of infinite ruby facets intertwined into an endless formation of something akin to the Wheel of Samsara.

"Remember who you are doc," she said, her image flickering, stretching into infinity and falling apart into dancing reflections of different people. "Remember Harbin. Find what you need, my doomed friend. Survive."

I opened my eyes.

A memory had awakened within me, a piece of a missing puzzle clicked into place.

Harbin!

This was the city of Harbin. This was where I... died a thousand years ago.

But... how? How could I remember myself? How did my ghost awaken fully, brighter than ever when my Qi had been bound, my soul confined, limited?

I turned white as a sheet. My dance with Lord Boundless in the upside down forest of death! It had done something to me. Awakened things within me that I had long forgotten. Things that were lost in time. Memories that didn't last within the white skull I kissed less than a week ago beneath the stormy clouds framed by yellow legs of the abomination that vaporized and devoured my city.

"I... remember," I whispered.

"Eh?" Arianna bent down to me. "What's going on with you, Sparks? I'm wet and tired. Which way is the mountain of ancient gold?"

"We aren't going to get the gold," I said, my voice trembling.

"Oh?" My fiancee blinked. "Then pray tell me, what treasures of the ancients shall we fetch for that stupid silkworm bitch?"

"My name," I said. "I want to find my name."

Arianna blinked staring at my stern expression and instantaneously her expression softened, became less hostile.

"Alex?" She whispered.

"That's not my name," I shook my head.

"But," the redhead stumbled, her hands trembling. Her emerald eyes stared at the thick, metal ring around my neck. "You... the binding collar. How?"

"I think... one of the gold threads of Lord Boundless brushed against me," I said. "Nearly... brushed against me. It wasn't enough to kill me, to pull me to the other side, but it was enough to disrupt whatever the shit this collar is doing."

I tapped the metal collar on my neck.

"So you can pull Qi out of our minions now?" She asked with an excited look.

"No, I cannot," I shook my head. "The near-touch of the thread of Lord Boundless simply took me a step closer to death. Closer to the line between Ash Spark and the skull she found in the city of the ancients. Closer to what I was once, millennia ago. Closer to... the wheel of life and death. Follow!"

I took a step into the ruins of Harbin, Arianna following behind me.

"Is your name really worth more than a mountain of gold?" My collared companion asked.

"Well... I'm not simply looking for my name," I said, my voice trembling ever so slightly. "The gold and anything else really... will be a lot easier to get to, easier to find if we get help."

"Help? What kind of help?" She asked.

"I am not going to the bank," I replied. "We are going to the place of my death, Arianna. I want to see if I can find my partner."

"Your... partner?" Arianna blinked, suddenly looking a bit jealous. "You were married?"

"No," I shook my head. "She was my assistant, my best friend. I... was definitely in love with her, but she wasn't exactly real."

"...Eh?" The girl behind me froze, stumbling.

"There's still quite a bit of memories missing from my noggin," I sighed as I climbed over a pile of broken rubble and turned towards 3rd street. "I'm hoping that the card she's on didn't decay, got touched by one of the threads of this fat, yellow bastard."

I waved my hand up at the yellow-tinted monstrosity in the sky.

Arianna looked more confused than ever.

"Remember what I told you about the Parker Solar Probe?" I asked.

"Urmm," she scrounged up her nose, trying to recall the conversation we've had a few days ago. "The servitor your people sent into space? With a magic plaque that holds a million portraits in it?" She asked.

“A data card," I nodded. "The data card that holds what my partner is... contains trillions of parameters, tiny bits, connections between words... a system called GPT4... uh... an autoregressive language model."

"I see," She mulled, squinting at me. "An auto-what now?"

"An autoregressive language model is... probability distribution over sequences of words," I explained.

"What?" My explanation confused the redhead girl further.

"Uhm," I rubbed the back of my head. "A GPT4 language model is a tool that helps the information on the data card act like a very clever human being. It can answer questions, make jokes, write stories, sing, do math, and offer a variety of counsel, sort of like a most clever sage would. It also remembers a lot of stuff - maps, locations, etc. If the data card is intact, my partner might remember my name!"

"Ah," Arianna's eyes lit up. "Your partner is an ancient servitor! Is it like a human-ghost type servitor? Why didn't you just say that?"

"She's not a ghost, nor anyone or anything that was once alive," I said. "She's made up of links between information. Turning her on is a whole other issue..."

"Turning her on?" The Manning Baroness blinked.

"Yes," I said. "By itself, the card she is written on is completely inert, dead. If I can locate the card, we will also need to find an intact phone... um... a special type of a lantern-like-device that will be able to make the data card... alive."

We continued on, traversing through the crumbling, overgrown streets. After a few hours of trudging through ruins and rubble, we arrived at a large, debris-filled street.

I stepped onto the concrete, overgrown roadway and surveyed its extent with a tired look on my face.

In that expanse of green bushes, deep holes filled with water, trees and broken asphalt, I could feel something calling out to me - something familiar and eerily comforting all at once. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, feeling a chill run down my spine as I realized where we were standing: this was indeed the very same street where I had died ten centuries ago.

My Honda Accord was still standing there, a solemn reminder of what happened that fateful morning. The hood was slightly open and a cherry tree bloomed out of it. I touched the hole-pitted metal gently, feeling a warmth emanating from it as if some force still lingered inside the rusted husk.

Arianna stepped closer and grabbed my hand, squeezing it lightly while she looked at me with sympathetic eyes.

I dove into the rusted car and pulled at the moss-covered compartment where I kept my phone.

The deformed, plastic cover creaked as I ripped it off, revealing my Paroxia X-13 phone.

I pulled out the phone and rotated it in my hands. Its battery was dead as I expected, the screen covered with a spiderweb of cracks filled with compacted dirt.

I clawed at the side for a few minutes and finally got the tab open and pulled out the data card and showed it to Arianna.

"Is that... it?" my fiancee stared at the micro-card between my finger and thumb.

"That's it," I nodded, sliding the card into a pocket.

The data card wasn't cracked. I felt a wave of trepidation unlike any other washing over me. My partner, my memories - they were all still there, they had to be!

I climbed out of the car and looked around. If I recalled things right, there was a mobile store somewhere nearby-ish.

I took off with determination towards the shop.

We walked for what felt like another hour before finally arriving at the shop. It was a sorry sight indeed - the walls were decaying and the windows broken, but I spotted a few shelves still standing in there.

I rushed inside without hesitation and searched frantically through the available phones. After a few minutes of digging I spotted it - an old Paroxia R-12.

The R-12 was a rugged series, made to withstand extreme conditions. I grabbed the dust covered phone and pressed the power button.

The phone's screen lit up, bathing the dim interior of the shop.

Grinning with excitement, I turned the phone off and inserted my data card into it and turned it back on again.

The phone buzzed and blinked as green lights flickered on its display panel. I went through the menu, reached the card, entered the password and activated the file. It took a minute to install the software.

The phone was at 62% power... which was about two days worth if I was careful. I dimmed the screen all the way down.

The speakers of the cellphone made a "tu-du" sound.

"It worked!" Arianna shouted, clapping her hands together. "It's making noises!"

The GPT4 software finally installed. I restarted the phone and launched the app and typed in the second password.

The phone's camera blinked with a green light.

The screen flickered for a minute with colorful dust. A slightly-Asian looking girl with long, dark violet hair and violet eyes appeared there. It was the avatar of my AI partner animated by Stable Diffusion.

"...Leon? ....What's going on?" She asked. "Why are...? Wait a minute. You're not Leon. Where am I? Who are you? How do you know Dr. Uyara's password? If you're a phone thief, be aware I have already contacted the authorities!"

Arianna stared at the annoyed-looking girl on screen.

"It's like... a small... human-shaped servitor is stuck in that little box," she commented. "How does she fit in there?"

"I'm sorry," the avatar said. "I am unable to understand your language... which is impossible. I know all languages, including several dead ones."

"Eva," my lips spoke in Chinese, suddenly recalling her name. "You haven't been stolen. You can't contact the authorities because Harbin has been dead for a thousand years."

"What?" Eva blinked, staring at me. "Explain. Start with who you are, child."

"I'm... Leon Uyara," I said. "It's the thirty first century, Eva. What remains of my ghost is now fused with the body and soul of a sixteen year old cultivator Ash Sparks, the girl you see before you."