Atkins updates Maurice Blanchot's paradox of the corpse — as the thing that both is and is not the dead person — for the HD - era: the more «real» and minutely detailed the digital image, the more remote and alien the object seems.
It's never explained what the crystal is, why the alien wants it, why he chose to coerce Gomo into helping or why Gomo already seems to know exactly where the object in question is.