Every morning, Liza wakes up and remembers that she’s been tortured. When she looks down at her hands, she can see slightly raised bumps where she believes she’s been implanted with microchips. She is certain that the chips track her every move, that her family has been programmed not to listen to her. She knows that her mind had been pushed to the limits of human endurance (“the most pain you could put on a person before they die”). The targeting, the rewiring of her brain, is so extreme that she can no longer even cry.

Liza is 56, a thin, wiry woman with elf-like ears and bright eyes, an artist who grew up in the Rocky Mountains. She worked at Microsoft for 10 years and started her own web development company with her partner before the electronic attacks, the stalking, and the surveillance began. She knew it had to be some form of technology attacking her—she’d worked in the technology industry for more than a decade. She knew what it was capable of.

When she sought help, a hospital committed her to a 10-day hold in the mental ward, teaching her how to calm her racing heart without addressing the technology that Liza believed was causing it. When she was released she found answers to her questions online. There was “an encyclopedia of information,” she says, a whole new vocabulary to help explain what she’d experienced: gangstalking, brain computer interface, psychotronics. “I felt really thankful,” she says. “I felt like I was opening up this crack into a whole new universe.”

Liza, who asked for her name to be changed, fearing retribution from the person or group behind her targeting, learned that she was one of thousands of people who identify themselves as “targeted individuals”: a victim of human experiments, tracked and stalked and harassed by remote electronic weapons. There were others who understood her plight, and together they could try to take action, fight back, and maybe, find some relief.

It was late October when my Uber slowed to a stop in the woods after dark. My driver seemed alarmed. We’d driven to the forests outside Boston, up a rocky, limited-access road with few lamps and no residences in sight. We pulled to a stop at the top of a hill with a few low, cinderblock buildings in the distance. It was dead quiet. “Where are you going?” he asked.

I tried my best to explain. I was there to attend the first ever Unity and Hope Conference, a weekend gathering of targeted individuals. The TIs were there to learn and organize and to be reminded that they were not alone.

I’d first heard about the TI community last summer while researching an article about RFID chips—those rice-grain sized devices that can be implanted beneath the skin and used to unlock laptops and doors. People have been implanting microchips in pets as “tracking” devices for years, even though the chips don’t actually track locations—they serve as virtual ID tags that confirm the identity of a lost pet if it’s listed in a database. Few people know as much about RFID chips as a biohacker named Amal Graafstra. On his website, I stumbled on a strange letter called “So You Think You’ve Been Implanted Against Your Will,” which he posted in 2016.

“Hello,” the letter began. “You’re likely here because you have a problem.” Graafstra went on to list common symptoms: You hear voices or see lights—you believe you’ve been implanted with a chip against your will. Graafstra wanted to help. He is actually a big proponent of RFID technology: He’s had a chip implanted in each hand since 2005.