A magician from Missouri had an unusual idea: to implant a computer chip in his hand and perform some funny tricks with it. It's a pity that he forgot the password.
It sounds like a story written by Kurt Vonnegut, but it actually happened to Tzu Teng Wang, a magician and molecular biologist from Missouri who wrote about his predicament on his Facebook account this month, along with an X-ray of his hand that showed the white outline of a microchip embedded in the meat between his thumb and index finger.
“I'm currently living my life in a cyberpunk dystopia with no access to the technology inside my body, and it's my damn fault,” wrote Wang, who goes by his stage name. Zee Mentalist.
At first glance, this is a pretty funny anecdote, but since companies like billionaire Elon Musk, Neirable introduce brain chips to the public, Wang's personal story serves as a cautionary tale about the risks of introducing any technology into your body, both private and government; companies may go bankrupt, product lines may be discontinued, or, as in Wang's case, you'll foolishly forget the damn password.
In a Facebook post, Wang explained that “many years ago” he had a radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip inserted into his hand to perform funny magic tricks, but it required someone – like a spectator – to press their smartphone with an RFID reader against Wang's hand to activate any trick he developed.
“[B]“But it turns out that repeatedly pressing someone else’s phone against my hand while trying to figure out where their phone’s RFID reader is isn’t actually super mysterious, magical, or amazing,” he wrote. “And often people disable this reader, while using my own phone to scan also doesn’t make sense for obvious reasons.”
Refusing to use the gadget as a magical prop, he later tinkered with the chip, overwriting it with a Bitcoin address and then linking it to a meme image on Imgur, an online image-sharing platform.
“But a few years ago the imgur link went down, and when I decided to overwrite the chip, I was horrified to realize that I had forgotten the password I used to lock it,” he said.
Resolution of the story: Tech friends told him that the only way to unlock the chip was to literally “tie an RFID reader for several days or weeks” to the palm of your hand and “try through all the possible combinations.” So the chip remains in his hand, the password is lost and that’s it.
“At least the imgur link is working again,” Wang wrote. “But I still don't have access to my own body technology, and it's inconvenient but fun.”
This is not the first time this has happened. Daniel Oberhaus, former writer Vice, recalculated back in 2018 how he was drunk and had a near-field communication (NFC) chip implanted in his arm. But like Wang, he forgot his password to the chip, turning the writer into what he called “the world's most useless cyborg.”
Luckily, after hours of poring over technical catalogs, he eventually found the password.
“If I had one piece of advice for anyone thinking about getting an NFC chip implanted, it would be to do it sober,” he joked.
More about microchips: British companies are implanting microchips in their employees
