Artifact: Skin Deep

Jesse Walker from the July 2002 issue

Behold the VeriChip, a new device the size of a grain of rice. Once implanted in you, it stores personal information and transmits it to a voyeuristic scanner. Its maker, Applied Digital Solutions, is marketing it to the medical industry, though it has noted other potential applications, including "enhancement of present forms of identification" and "various law enforcement and defense uses."

Interviewed by Wired News, company president Scott Silverman mentions one more target market: "Generation Y people who want to get chipped because they think it's cool." Is this what happens when The X-Files gets cancelled? Voltaire once said -- I paraphrase -- that if evil alien overlords did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. If they did exist, though, would it really be necessary to embrace them?