So Willing found an opening listed online at a nursing home facility called Elysian Fields, a short bike ride away on Eastern Parkway. For the scut work going begging—emptying bed pans, mopping—all they required was able-bodied youth. (Youth was the sole resource his small cohort possessed for which there was a seller’s market.) So during the job interview, his hiring looked to be rubber-stamped, until he mentioned as an afterthought—if it was a problem, best address the matter now—that he hadn’t been chipped.
The news raised every eyebrow in the room. “That’s quite irregular,” one committee member murmured. Another whispered, “Is that even legal now?” He might as well have revealed that he was a carrier of gray-squirrel flu. They instinctively pulled back from their interviewee an inch or two. He was informed that chipping was a nonnegotiable precondition of employment, not only here but anywhere in New York State. If he took care of it—“A five-minute business,” one of them assured him, “bit more of a sting for an adult than for an infant, but you’ll be right as rain by the next day”; another bureaucrat added, “Can get it done in any clinic or ER, on a walk-in basis, and for free! I was an early adopter, and it cost me two hundred nuevos”—he had the job.
Back home, Nollie was staunchly against it—an easy stance for her to take, since citizens over sixty-eight were exempt. “A monstrous idea,” she said. “You’ll be their creature.” But then, the elderly always balked at innovation. Had shrivs stayed in charge, everyone would still be getting around in donkey carts.
Granted, Willing could instead have swept up the house as best he could and sold the disheveled property in East Flatbush under value. He and Nollie could have headed back to Citadel. But Jarred had grown irascible. Though farms were gradually being re-privatized now that the worst of the food shortages had abated, he was livid over being expected to buy back his own property. Of the supportive extended family that had filled his younger days with humor and solidarity, only Kurt remained. Nollie might not have believed it herself, but she needed readier access to quality medical care than Gloversville provided. Resistance to a simple prerequisite of living in the modern world seemed at once childish and old-womanish.
Turning a blind eye, then, to a wadding in his stomach as if he’d eaten a double order of dumplings, Willing strode too casually into King’s emergency room and stated his purpose. “Goodness,” the nurse exclaimed. “You’re awfully old to be a virgin! However have you got by? You’re not one of those strikers, are you? Lolling about on your parents’ sofa?”
“No,” he said. He didn’t care for her ushering touch on his shoulder—the claiming, the corralling, the collusive inclusion, the welcome-to-the-club—but it was too late now. She had literally got her hands on him.
In the simple white room, he was instructed to lie face down while they ran a quick sequencing of his saliva swab; the chip would forever be linked to his DNA. His forehead fit into a padded cradle, while the nurse adjusted the setting screws until each point contacted his head. The brace recalled the abattoir, where Jarred had taken veal calves, scarcely worth raising to mature cows for so little reward: a narrow chute steadied the skull, ensuring the bolt at the temple would plunge home. Willing could not move his head a hair. That was the idea. For his protection, the nurse explained sweetly. Otherwise, the slightest twitch “might leave him a paraplegic.” She laughed.
He did not like lying on his stomach. The position was sexual, a posture of submission. He fought a rising panic as she swung a mechanism behind him and leveled it at the base of his skull—a soft, tender depression, undefended. Glass and chrome maybe, but the device looked like a gun. When she fired it, a white pain flashed up the face of Great Grand Man, gaunt, and pale, and red on one side, before he pitched beside the fire.
Since that afternoon at King’s, Willing’s sense of himself had been small and inert. He felt limp, lackluster, lumpen. Fearful. Figures flickered in his peripheral vision that, once he turned to them, were not there. He went through a period of scouring his nape with a washcloth several times a day. He felt desecrated, and contaminated, and invaded—as if what had connived itself into his neck weren’t a chip but a tapeworm. He felt watched. He felt ashamed. He felt the need to cover himself, even in his old bedroom, on his own. For a time, even Nollie maintained her distance—mumbling, tight-lipped, keeping her thoughts to herself. She asked warily, “Can that thing hear?”
He had never put it to anyone else outright. He had not regarded himself as a seer, a savant. He had not, precisely, been able to forecast the future. But since he was about fourteen, the disparate bits and pieces that he had been collecting, idly, like seashells, had cohered. Facts that others hadn’t fit together would form a pattern. He had known things, and the things he had known had been true, or had come true. Ever since the chipping, the part of his head that perceived so clearly had gone dead.
Oh, it wasn’t that he trusted the fringier theories on the net. He did not believe the federal government controlled his mind. He accepted that the chip performed the functions it was purported to. It registered direct deposits of his salary. It deducted the costs of any products he chose to buy. It debited his utility bills. Though Willing had no experience of either, it recorded investments and received state benefits. It subtracted local, state, and federal taxes, which totaled 77 percent of his pay. It communicated his every purchase to the agency known until 2039 as the Internal Revenue Service—what the item cost, when and where he bought it, and the product’s exact description, down to model, serial number, or sell-by date. It informed the American tax authorities if he bought a packet of crackers. Were the chip to accumulate an excess of fiscal reserves—an amount that surpassed what he required on average to cover his expenses for the month—it would dun the overage at an interest rate of -6 percent. Should the balance cross various thresholds, that interest rate would progress up to -21 percent. (Saving was selfish. Saving was bad for the economy. Negative interest rates also provided Americans a short course in mathematics from which an undereducated public could surely benefit. At -21 percent compounded annually, 
100 was worth 30.77 five years later.) Any additional income, including gift coupons for a birthday, revenue from pawned possessions, bake-sale proceeds, and private-party poker winnings, would also register on the chip, and would also be taxed at 77 percent. Chipping solved the problem of the hackable, stealable, long dysfunctional credit card. Chipped, you were a credit card.
Parental protest over the chipping of newborns died down altogether when states began depositing a generous 2,000 “baby bond” in every infant’s chip. To the population at large, chipping was promoted as the ultimate convenience, and the ultimate in financial security. No more having to carry a wallet or device that thieves could seize on the street. At self-checkout, the terminal simply scanned your head. No more PINs or unique twenty-five-digit passwords, with numbers and letters and signs. No more biometric verification—the fingerprints, facial recognition, and iris scans that hackers had learned to duplicate as fast as the novel authentications had been brought in, since anything digitized can be copied. Obviating the bank account, with its erosive fees, your chip had its own website, or chipsite, for arranging monetary transfers. Its calculation of GPS coordinates precise within a millimeter, your chip communed with your very DNA, thrummed to your very pulse. If anyone contacted your chipsite whose distinctive heartbeat didn’t synchronize perfectly with the pounding in your chip, your funds went into lockdown. So no one could pretend to be you, and the account that went everywhere you went was safe from predators. (The feds somewhat oversold this feature in the early versions. In a surge of “chipnappings,” individuals were forced to make online transfers at gunpoint. Updates guaranteed that when the chip detected high levels of stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, or even heavy doses of tranquilizers that might suppress those hormones, transfers would not go through. The same bio-sensitivity ensured that gamblers could not place rash bets while drunk, which had a distinctly depressive effect on the casino industry.)