Mr

Outcast, leper, unclean, all these words come to mind.

They took away my life as sure as killing me, quickly and painlessly yet utterly nonetheless. My key no longer opened doors; rather it made sure they stayed closed against me. My passport no longer allowed me to travel; rather it restricted my movements. My money would no longer allow me to buy certain everyday things. I could only access certain computers; even then, they queried why I wanted to know particular information.

I could have just torn it out of my arm. Easily enough done I'm sure, the chip is only subdermal. Thousands of people every year go to hospital to have their chips replaced after losing them in minor accidents, so I do not imagine it would be so hard to 'accidentally' lose mine. To what end, though? Without the chip I would not have been able to do anything, not even the little I was still allowed to do. Humanity will survive without the chip; society will rebuild itself without the chip. But in the biochip civilisation, a person without a chip cannot survive. A person without a chip has not existed for decades simply because they could not survive.

My work was gone, as was my reputation. From respected pre-eminence in my field to laughing stock, they had seen to that too. My records were changed, my acclaimed past works were proven to be faked. They said I had falsified results, stolen work from others, all manner of heinous crimes. It was a pointless attention to detail. I had spoken out against the fundamentals of society, which was enough. No employer would entertain my applications, no publisher would touch my work, and no university would so much as acknowledge my existence.

You may say I had a lot of spare time on my hands.

It was not easy, what I planned, although I could see no other rational course of action. When I first raised my questions the ideas were entirely hypothetical. I had never seriously considered that the biochip should be disposed of. I took it utterly for granted, as did we all. Only when I saw it work against me did I begin to truly doubt its worth. Double edged sword, two sides of the same coin, all clumsy metaphors but appropriate. Throughout my life I had seen the good in the biochips; now I felt at first hand all that was bad about them.

So I planned. I wrote the work they would not let me write in my past life, only this time I wrote it the right way. I wrote it in a way that never once relied on biochips. I wrote it with typewriter, with pen and pencil, ink and graphite on wood-pulp paper. I researched it from paper books in old libraries, never once looking into a computer's mind for the answers I sought. I took notes, tangible things that I could hold in my hand or spread out on my floor. Fragile things that I could crumple up in frustration when they did not tell me what I wanted to know; resilient things that I could straighten out when I realised later that they did.

Private things, that I could hide so that only I knew they existed.

I did not tell anybody what I was doing. At best they would have laughed; I do not care to think about what they would have done at worst. In any event I never attempted to publish my work once it was finished, that was no longer the point of the exercise. I merely wanted to be sure in my own mind that I was right.