I first heard about magnet implants in college, but I didn’t seriously pursue one until my colleague Ben Popper got his for the piece that would become "Cyborg America." At a Brooklyn tattoo parlor in 2012, I watched someone cut along the top of my finger, tear open a pocket with a dowel, and slide in a dark rod about half the size of a sunflower seed. Later, when I ran my hand across everything in my apartment and felt it humming over an intercom, I fell in love. I began to catalog sensations: the vicious pinch of picking up a Buckyball, the jitter of using a microwave, the sense of floating when I hovered my hand above another magnet.

We don’t get stopped by airport security or magically crash computers

These days, Ben is bored with his implant. Neither he nor I have ever felt trains going by underneath us or found distant electrical signals while walking down the street. We don’t get stopped by airport security or magically crash computers by touching them. Still, I’ve never stopped liking mine. My body is more like a paper doll than a capable tool, but it holds the seeds of tiny superpowers. I can lift screws out of holes when I’m opening up electronics. I can sweep up pins while I’m sewing. I’m acutely aware of the invisible signals that machines and electronics put out. It’s mostly useless stuff, yes, but how many of the textures you feel qualify as need-to-know information? These days, the magnet no longer feels like magic, but you can still find me waving my hand in front of running microwaves from time to time. I’d feel bereft if I couldn’t sense the little arc over the "Enter" key of my MacBook, which I think means I’m near the hard drive.

A year and a half later, I bought an NFC chip, deciding that if it was even a fraction as much fun as the magnet, I wanted it. It wasn’t hard to find. The site Dangerous Things sells a passive tag — a chip that doesn’t require a battery to work, like the ones you find in rings or business cards or stickers — pre-loaded into a syringe and packaged with plastic gloves and disinfectant. Fast as the magnet installation was, it was like having my skin ripped off. The NFC injection was more like giving blood. If you’ve got an Android device, it’s also easy to program, although positioning an antenna to read through my hand is another matter.