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After I get off work, I change into a comfortable outfit, grab the device I use to connect myself to the external power supply and plug it in to charge. I grab a few things I want to take for lunch with me. My sandwich boards won't be able to power the external battery if it runs out – though, I suppose I could use my phone's battery if I wanted to. I haven't needed to do that in an uninterrupted six months. My external battery packs about 9 hours of electricity or about 8 minutes for a cup of coffee.

Every human being has a unique implant that's linked to something in the cell phone network that's constantly transmitting a constant stream of information on their health and well-being. Some of this may be useful to them, some of it may be bothersome – not vital, but still stupid. The implant isn't that great at being concerned about losing power though. I've learned to conserve the battery, so even if the implant starts losing power, my phone can take over for the moment.

A couple years ago, the media started telling people to stop downloading everything on their devices and to unplug their phones from the implant. Everyone laughed and dismissed this as the conspiracy theory of a couple crazy people. There was no reason to be worried. The implants were designed to safely store data, and the way the implants dealt with power was prudent and smart. I was happy to be unplugged. No more intrusions into my life, no more noisy refrigerators in my bedroom, no more cars that got stupid just by moving.

But today, I plug in the implant, and it's charging again. Huh. I click through my newsfeeds and see that people are being told now not to plug in their implants. Maybe the collective consciousness is aware of a the fact that many people have already disconnected from their implants, but it's still around to tell everyone else this. Maybe the implants are being programmed to recharge when people plug in.

I read about the new regulations about implants in the news and go to my fridge. This one needs a new battery. I pull it out and open the battery door. I press the jack into the jack of the external battery. "Wait for it," I say to myself as I look at the third light in the power charging indicator. The first two were already on. The second flashes on and off and I see the third light connect and stay on.

It takes a while to charge, I think while I eat. The new regulations have the wireless network listening on all frequencies to see if the implant is trying to hold a connection with the network. If someone's using their implant, it will be silenced. This only happens with the implants of people that haven't been to a hospital in the last year. The last time I went to the hospital, I had to sign a contract that stated that I didn't have the implant and wouldn't try to go back to the hospital ever again. That obviously kept me from having the implant.

Unplugging was tedious and had been somewhat haphazard at first. Some people just left their implants on, some people disconnected them. The implants also communicate with each other, and the signal on the network changed, so people that had plugged back in changed their settings to reconnect with signals everywhere. But then we got more efficient, and more people managed to disable the new override.

Some people might think that this isn't a bad thing. It's just like the military. They make sure we don't come back. They make sure that every soldier who comes back is healed and ready to go out there again. They make sure we don't have to deal with the pain and the suffering of death. We use our minds to heal the bodies of the people we love. If a soldier has a family to support, they can get a new body. Maybe they will say it's better to just deal with the wounds of people who are already dead and replace their organs with new ones.

I think it's terrible. Instead of making them alive and letting them live like they were supposed to, we turn people into a collection of spare parts. We're making ourselves into spare parts for our families.

I disconnect my implant and put it back in the fridge.

Some people who have implants have said that it's better not to have them anymore, and they have been talking about cutting off the access to the implant. I don't know why they don't just unplug it and throw it in the trash. If the network says it's no longer connected, the implant won't have the power to not respond to the network and to discharge its stored power.

I'd like to see the government try to tell people to unplug the implants, and only giving their data to the government. I know people say they don't want to give data to the government, but it's just not true. You sign the terms, the terms say how long the data is stored, you agree, you're allowed to be a citizen.

I guess I kind of knew what I was getting into when I have this thing. My implant was one of the new ones, so there was no obligation for data storage. The manufacturers had told people that the implant was quite efficient, so our free will and privacy would be preserved. That seemed reasonable to me at the time. The only alternative I had to get a little more freedom and stay out of the hospitals that had privatized the field, and I took any alternative. It's kind of ludicrous to go out there and lop off the already dead part of the body. Dead seems so much more permanent than an extension of a permanent address.

Still, I wish the implant wasn't in me. I don't miss it. It was just something useful to have next to my skin, I guess.

"Why don't you just take the implant out?" my father once asked me."

"What would happen if I did that?" I asked him. I was thinking that there wasn't even a good reason to consider it. They didn't even give us much time to make up our mind. I know that they're going to disable implants really quickly once they are shut down. It's not like the implant is going to protect me from anything significant anymore.


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