Mr. Anderson, a suburban dad in a Nike T-shirt who woke up at dawn to go into town and get everyone doughnuts, responds without a beat: “Yep, plug me in and get ready!” The two shared a ride together up from Los Angeles, organized by Louis.

Magnets and RFID implants are rites of passage among grinders. On the avant-garde, according to Ryan O’Shea, a former broadcast journalist who runs the podcast Future Grind, are powered subdermal devices, which could communicate things like blood pressure and sugar levels via Bluetooth, and D.I.Y. gene therapies. Results of the latter have so far been mixed. Earlier this year, the creator of a purported hack for lactose intolerance scarfed down a cheese pizza at the end of a YouTube video. Another biohacker, who at a conference in February injected himself onstage with what he said was an untested herpes treatment, was last month found dead in a flotation tank.

On Saturday, as talks take place about wound care and prototyping, Louis is in the adjacent lab, dipping an electroluminescent wire — think a glow-in-the-dark shoelace — into a mucus-y mix. Hylyx is nearby, preparing magnets for other implants. The plan is, with Mr. Tibbetts’s help, to insert the wire underneath Hylyx’s skin, its coated ends extending from two incisions, for a period of three days, which will both be cool looking and a test as to whether the human body rejects the mixture, by, for instance, becoming infected. Louis hopes his coating, which he implanted successfully into nine of 11 mice over winter break as part of a science-fair experiment, and which garnered state and local prizes, might prevent infection in various scenarios: everything from futuristic charging ports, embedded in our skin, to the central-line IV wires currently used in hospitals.