Missouri magician and molecular biologist Zi Teng Wang thought he’d spice up his act by incorporating a little bit of a cyberpunk dystopian vibe. So, he implanted an RFID chip into his hand that he could use to trigger magic tricks, which sounds like cheating. I’m not up on the latest ethical debates in the magic community, but that definitely sounds like cheating.
He then forgot the password.
Wang, who goes by the stage name Zi the Mentalist, recently posted an X-ray on Facebook showing the chip lodged between his thumb and index finger, along with an admission that he has absolutely no idea how to access it anymore. “I’m living my own cyberpunk dystopia life right now,” he wrote.
Originally, the chip was supposed to create slick, futuristic illusions. Audience members could tap their phones to his hand and trigger tricks. In theory, at least.
In practice, Wang discovered that repeatedly asking strangers to press their phones against his palm doesn’t give off the vibes of ancient mysticism that he probably hoped for and seemed to remind audiences more of store checkout lanes. He also found that a lot of phones had that feature disabled. The magic of magic is dampened a bit when an audience member has to fumble through their phone settings.
Eventually, Wang repurposed the implant to link to a Bitcoin address, which is sad in its own way. It got even sadder when he changed it again to redirect to an Imgur meme. The sadness seemingly peaked when the link to that Imgur meme died. You can’t have an RFID chip in your palm that links to a 404, so as he went to rewrite the chip, he realized that the sadness had really and truly peaked when, after all that time, he had forgotten the password entirely.
Some friends told him the only way to crack it would be to strap an RFID reader to his hand for weeks and brute-force every possible combination. The chip remains locked, and it seems like it will stay that way forever unless Wang finds a sticky note with the password written on it somewhere in his desk.
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