When 39 overdue-payment notices popped up on her phone, a palm-sized sprite crawled out of the bill page.
“My name is Little Heart,” the sprite said. “Those fragments of memory in your mind aren’t dreams. They’re source code left behind by your previous life.”
The girl looked at herself across the room, bleary-eyed from staying up late working overtime. No, not just herself: countless versions of her from parallel worlds, all being consumed by tainted pheromones.
The sacrificial pit for the dead in the late Shang dynasty, the mass graves at the end of the dynasty,
despair from every era was gathering into a black fog, about to flood into the present.
Little Heart said, “This time, you must go to every site of collapse and rewrite the tainted pheromones into a unified source.”
She clenched the warm glow in her palm. “But I’m just an office drone drowning in debt...”
“Wrong,” Little Heart said with a smile. “What you owe isn’t money. It’s the love you left for yourself in your previous life.”
