Alejandro's eyes jolted open. He gasped a few desperate breaths. He was sprawled along the floor of some dark, dusty room. Slowly, he clutched the wall lifting himself back up. Jesus, what was that smell? A sharp clanging odor of burnt copper bars. Like ground-zero of a Wall-E implosion.

Alejandro scanned the area as he tried to gain his bearings. He blinked a couple of hard blinks. The lights were off, he couldn't see shit. He aimlessly grasped for the light chain and pulled. It flickered on a dull yellow. It was a dingy motel room cluttered with take out boxes and scorched high-tech equipment. Burn marks freshly scarred the shitty carpet; some sort of experiment had gone wrong here.

He peeked through the blinds. Moonlight glistened, fallen from the olive skies, luminating harmoniously with buzzing neon signs onto the pastel red and green rows of glazed tile buildings. How long had Alejandro been reclused in Chicago's bustling Chinatown? It was hard to tell. It only took two weeks of sleepless nights for everything to become too mucky to confidently interpret. It was 3:52 AM judging by the declining position of the white ball in the air. He knew it, but wasn't exactly sure why.

He examined himself. From top to bottom, a mess of unkempt hair and deep dark-circled eyes on a head that held a scrawny brown body in a pair of boxer-briefs. He ran his finger along his torso. His ribs were showing. When did that happen? Lets see. Fifteen paper boxes of takeout: peking duck, mapo tofu, steamed fish times two, steamed buns times three, beef noodle soup, lamb skewers, red-braised pork, scallion pancakes, lamb skewers. And what were those last three? Just plain white rice more than likely. That's four thousand- no, five thousand calories over twenty or so days. Approximately, two-hundred and fifty calories per day, BMI of about ten to fifteen. Yeah, that makes sense. He just needed a shirt.

Alejandro pulled on a Chicago Bulls tee strown on the ground. It draped on his body like a blanket. He looked around. Now what the hell was all of this? Piles of charred twelve foot fiber optic cables connected through five percent metal-oxide semiconductor transistors and an RS-232 serial port into a basic-ass Intel 8086 CRT PC? Alejandro stared at the desktop's blue screen, flickering right back at him. He flicked on the coffee machine and lit up a cigarette. What the hell were you up to Alejandro? It had to add up to something. He took a couple drags as he tried to remember. He continued to follow the cables. They charged some sort of quantum interface device powered by photodetector circuits. It was the type of set-up to charge a full-on diode laser. That could only mean?- He was on the brink of some sort of b-tech quantum particle modulator. Alejandro scoffed. You crazy son of a bitch.

But where had it all gone wrong? He rubbed his finger through the charred carpet marks and inhaled. Titanium alloy. How could he have been so stupid. He had used damn titanium alloy as a conduit transfer. That was like using a Cheeto to deflect a fucking Ion Pulse Cannon. Of course it blew up. He needed something about one billion times more robust. But there was only one mineral compound that could act as a conduit for that kind of energy transfer. At least, one that a human could conceivably get their hands on- Diamonds. Eighty-five percent minimum. But how?