(Prompt photo by David Zawila on Unsplash.com) 

Death.

Uno's glide was broken by the the thunk-thunk-thunk as he rolled over the growing chasms of neglect in the aging concrete slabs. Light tentatively crept through the broken window panes, their edges still as sharp and hurtful as the emotions that had smashed them all those years ago.

Uno was a soft figure in his dark hoodie and sweats, moving beneath a canopy of angry human expression, shadows and light playing out an old story across his path. He set his left foot down as he came to a turn, breathing hard, before swivelling and pushing off again onto his right for the glide, the quiet whirr of his wheeled-foot accompanying his travels deeper into the abandoned dark. His roughly-hewn black hair stirred under his hood, the air a cool comfort to his exertions.

A regular patinador. Uno's mother used to say, watching him get around. Stubborn pride refused to let her see him do anything less than the impossible. So you have one foot, you going to let that stop you from getting around? No. You want it? You do it. No excuses. Her work ethic was written on her fingers with layers of calluses. Nobody could out-work Mama. Uno expected nothing less of himself.

The toxic trash dumped across the border into their water table caused birth defects in all the downstream coastal villages. Being born without a foot wasn't the worst thing that could happen. He'd seen others, much worse off, drooling and babbling, forever a burden on their families.

Not him. No. Uno had made his first prosthetic when he was eight. He was twenty-four now, a master of his own inventions. 3D printers and his country's own e-waste market fuelling his efforts. That, and there were no other options. The 50,000 pesos needed for a prosthetic was out of the question working the jobs he did.

But now, it almost didn't matter.

Death.

Uno reached the other end of the hallway, a cracked pile of black plastic computer desktop plates filling the corner. He turned catching a whiff of some humero d'oro: someone was burning, risking all their tomorrows for the gold of today: a feast of toxic ash and cash if you were willing to burn through the electronic run-off from richer countries to get it.

He reached to adjust the mask over his face, catching himself as his hand came up empty. He'd ripped it off after vomiting up the blood. He'd known then there was no point in protecting himself from the fumes anymore, he was a dead-man walking.

Ultimately Uno was lucky: A man working the electronic junk yard didn't often live past twenty years. To reach twenty-four before becoming diseased was inordinately better than dying at age nine, like his sister, age fifteen like his friend Miguel or before your first birthday, of which there were too many to count. He knew his people didn't have much of a chance, you had to take what you could get, and count yourself lucky.

The pain in his abdomen was getting worse. He gave himself a month, or less. These cancers, they came on fast and ate you up, like a fire from the inside. He didn't bother researching it online, he'd seen it with his own eyes.

He continued down the dark corridor of the half-buried building, a loading port at some point, back when the sea was a resource for food, and there were fish to eat.

Holes in the roof cast mottled light across the cracked pavement as he balanced across it on his one wheeled leg. The carbon fork he'd applied from a broken bike took a considerable amount of weight, and was light as well. He leaned here and there adjusting the speed, jumping over some fissures and coming to a stop before the dimly lit panel.

Uno entered the code finally, 314159, an easy mathematical number for him to remember. He liked wheels, and closed circuits. That made 3.14159 rather fitting. His own education had come in spurts of internet usage, with him diving into questions and discovering he had a knack for numbers, wires, and the world of physics.

The stained faces of the rusted metal doors of containment cell D2 slid soundlessly open at his command. This was far from the grinding, halting, half-broken state he'd found them in ten years ago. But machinery was his realm, and even back then, with his rather rudimentary skills, he'd had it powered, oiled, re-programmed, and re-aligned in a matter of days. His one true escondite and haven in this inhumane hell he'd been born into.

He glided inside, hopping the first set of cords that ran the length of the disintegrating laminate floor. The lights grew and a voice met him,

"Still alive then?" Came the potentially sentient Artificial Intelligence "Al" he'd salvaged from a particularly fruitful dump from somewhere in North America.

"Don't hold your breath." Uno answered coming up to his wall of refurbished waste: a few screens, microphones, speakers, keyboards, less common medical equipment- ultrasound devices, and the spiralling mess of cords leading to the glowing, tubed and glass-cased motherboard of his own creation.

Monitors came to life, and camera lenses zoomed in on him,

"Why do you antagonize me with physiological challenges?" Al replied, a note of frustration in his audio.

"It helps you build a sense of self." Uno went to his go-to answer.

"I am more than aware of the parameters that have been set for me, fleshbag." Al replied happily dishing it back to Uno, even as he flicked on the overhead lights to bring focus on the project.

Two years ago, Uno had acquired something that should never have found its way into the junkyard. When he'd first spotted the broken tokamak, he'd done a double take, before kneeling quickly and slipping it up into the secret compartment above his prosthesis. New fusion technology, powerful enough to fuel his modified ideas on an atomic printer.

For as long as he could remember, Uno had been after the real thing, that is, a real foot. He knew the ideas behind the atomic printers, still in development, but Uno had ideas of his own. Ideas that, until he'd found the tokamak, had remained utterly, uselessly theoretical. The tokamak had changed all that: enough energy to create the basic building blocks of the universe.

Fueling and repairing the tokamak had taken the last two years. Deuterium he'd sourced from the slow distillation of sea water. Tritium had been more difficult: a scavenged collection of glowing devices such as watch faces, firearm sights and exit signs.

Then he'd hit a wall.

He hadn't been able to get the risk of failure below twenty percent. A one-in-five chance of failure would be acceptable if only messing up didn't mean certain death.

Only now, he was dying anyways.

Uno would either get a new foot, or die trying. Which was, in all truth, a better way to go then living through the painful disintegration of his body.

His fingers entered the last line of commands. In the next five minutes he would discover whether he was a genius, or, a very dead scrapper from a pitifully polluted village along the coast of Argentina.

He reflected a long moment on all the thoughts that had built to this moment. The idea that from enough energy you could create matter, the basic theorized ingredients in the universe's birthing plasma: quarks and gluons. From there, one might create any assemblage of atoms, cells, or organisms, including, he hoped, a foot.

This terajoule level of energy needed containment. Fortunately the advent of zirconium diboride based heat shields and their uses in cheaply fabricated kitchen appliances had solved his problem. Like everything else, these devices were built to fail quickly so that the consumer fed the economy and purchased a new one. The result was a ready availability of it in the e-waste dumps, such as were found in his village.

His companion Al had provided the computational power necessary to process the mammoth amount of data needed to make his theoretical design a reality.

Now it was time to find out if he really could take nothing and turn it into something.

He pressed down on the faded key that simply read turn.

Everything blinked, a deep hum sneaking into his body as the lights lit and the heat shield countered the impossible energy generated inside this amalgamation of broken parts.

The first ten seconds passed. He was still alive.

He stood up, realizing with slight disbelief that it was working, printing and building. His heart pounded. Maybe-

The lights blinked again, perhaps affected by the intense electromagnetic field it was creating. The Tokamak's light stayed a steady blue, he could hardly breathe.

It was the longest five minutes of his life.

With a whirring winding down it was done. The Tokamak shut off, and the heat shield blinked back to its safe green.

Something sat in the tray, foot-shaped.

He pulled it out and glided himself back over to the table. A foot, with a raw-looking million sensors built into the attachment area. A foot that should fit his own appendage perfectly. He sat down carefully, setting it before him on the table, watching as the hairs on the toe arched in response to the chill in the room.

He yanked off the wheel. Hesitating only a moment before picking up the foot, its warm fleshy heaviness exactly right and wrong at the same time. He was breathing fast as he lowered it to his own extremity and slipped it on, letting it drop to the laminate.

The sensation of floor was immediate: a flat, cool, dusty surface relaying all its–

-he was falling, bending, vanishing into – a- no–thought- he wasn't- and then he was.

Stars, blackness, NO AIR! Pressure on him everywhere, he couldn't orient himself, couldn't breathe. Stars as he'd never seen them, and cold. The foot floating before him in this cosmic array of space. It rotated, its sensory attachment bumping his left fingertips and-

Bending, vanished, flattened, ceased-

Uno emerged with a thump to land on his back on the floor of the D2 cell. He recognized the open vents, cracked insulation and piping, the smells of old dust and burnt capacitors. His chest was a painful pressure until somehow air coughed into him. He rolled over, coming to face the foot, which was lying on its side, its sensory cup towards him.

As he watched its image wavered, the light bending in ways it should not. The foot rippled, like the eye of tiny hurricane.

"What-" He croaked a cough out.

"You're back!" Al said chipperly. From where? Uno thought in a painful haze.

Uno sat up feeling sore, looking at the foot. After a long moment, he reached for it, careful not to touch the top. He looked down at the attachment, watching the image waver before him, vortexing, and then reappearing as it should.

He felt a moment of light-headedness as he realized he'd forgotten to factor in the very theoretical laws on quantum entanglement.

The burst of energy had created matter here, but also, it would appear, an equal and opposite anti-mass, elsewhere. He'd made two feet. Theoretically the two were linked in a fourth dimension. Linked by something akin to a wormhole, one he may just have travelled through.

"High five Al," Uno said, slapping the floor.

"You know that is a physical impossibility for me," replied Al sounding disgruntled.

Uno wasn't listening. He held an old cellphone over the mouth of the foot, watching it fall and vanish into the vacuum of space.

An image of their original pristine beach grew in his mind. "Forget parameters Al, we're going to be changing the definition of... everything."