On the 19th of September I took a multi hour long coach up to Middlesborugh to meet up with a piercing specialist called Kim, also known as Skin Seamstress to have a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip by the company Dangerous Things implanted into my left hand. It’s a little glass capsule with a coil of wire inside and that’s pretty much it and, despite the gauge of the needle, it didn’t hurt much at all, there was just a sharp pain for a little while, with a fair amount of bleeding and a very noticeable fuzzy feeling in the hand, like it was under water the whole time, this is due to small nerve damage that is unavoidable when injecting into such a nerve dense area of the body. I am now the world’s most useless cyborg (almost, I’m slightly more useful than Elon’s wage slave bots).

It’s been 2 weeks since I had it done and the small puncture wound on my hand is healing very quickly, there is a small scar on the hand where the scab used to be but its healing over, a yellow bruise was present for a while too but it has since faded.

As of the 14th of October the wound has entirely healed over and become a reddish scar on my hand, I can just barely feel the implant under my skin if I run my finger over the skin lightly.

So, why did I do it?

Species euphoria mostly, the idea of being chipped like an animal makes my brain tingle in a good way :3

Plus it’s a form of bio-hacking/body modding, which has always been a huge interest of mine, especially when it comes to taking control of your own body and “improving” it so-to-speak, now if you put an NFC reader (like your phone’s one) up to my hand at the right angle it will pull up my website on your phone, or anything else that I want the phone to do, like a rick roll or tie a lock to my tag’s serial number, it sounds like a fun pet project to work on.

I know a few other therians who have had a similar chip implanted and I feel like it’s a thing more people and non-humans should have done given the chance, obviously ymmv when it comes to the applications of the chip itself but having it in the first place is very validating to me personally.

The dangers

Honestly, there weren’t many risks to this. The biggest risk one would encounter if they were doing this would be not keeping the equipment or the skin clean and sterile throughout the process. Obviously it’s very important to keep your skin sterile when you’re shoving a giant needle under it so the wound doesn’t get infected.

The main other risk is if the needle were to hit a bone and inject the chip near it, which could rub against the bone and cause issues, a little nerve damage is always to be expected but minimising it is important too.

What if I get an MRI? What if I have to go through a metal detector? Well, people have had these implants since as early as the 2000s and have never encountered any major issues with them, due to it being below the skin it is extremely hard for a metal detector to trigger as a result of it; as for an MRI, there will be a small amount of fuzz around the hand which is to be expected, but nothing more will occur, it wont get ripped out of your skin final destination style, it might warm up a little but nowhere near enough to harm you in any way.

Small tangent - fuck anti homeless architecture

This is related I swear, when I was at the Middlesborough bus interchange I noticed something incredibly stupid - the power outlets were LOCKED, there was a key hole on every outlet that stopped you from plugging anything in without a key, which is mostly to prevent homeless people from sheltering in the station and “jacking power” (charging their devices), there were also very shitty and uncomfortable benches that had little arms between each seat in the row to stop people laying down, fuck that.