Blog Love Omega Glee: Be Hip! Get A Chip! (15 April 2012)

Francine smells coffee brewing. She gets out of bed, and follows the scent downstairs to the kitchen, where Masani is making breakfast for herself. "Morning, cutie. You're up early!"

"Must. Have. Coffee," Francine says, opening the cupboard.

"Help yourself. I made extra. I had a feeling you or Donald would be up shortly."

Francine pours a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker, which has just finished gurgling, and says, "Thanks. Donald's still sleeping? Usually, I'm the last one up on a Sunday."

"That man's been like a creature of the night lately. He'll probably sleep all day. I don't know what he's doing."

"Um, coffee, yum!" Francine says, after taking a sip, "Sleeping all day sounds pretty yummy to me too, but after I drink this, I'll probably be up for the duration."

"How was work?" Masani says, putting a bowl of oatmeal in the microwave.

"Dead. Dead. Dead. Ever since there were those kidnappings in downtown Cleaveland, business has been down."

"Yeah, those were awful, especially that one where they cut off the bank manager's hand to get access to the vault."

"That's cause he had one of those radio frequency identification microchip implants in his hand, right?"

"Yep! You couldn't pay me enough to get one of those. We have them at work though. They put them in some patients to keep track of their medical information and to make sure no one who comes into the hospital for a checkup leaves without their gall bladder or something because of a wrong operation due to mistaken identity."

"You know, I overheard some women last night at the restaurant who were talking about getting chip implants so that if they get kidnapped they could be located with a Global Positioning System."

"An SOS through a GPS, huh? Hmm . . . I suppose it depends on the implant, but most of the implants don't transmit automatically. They basically just sit there until they come into range of a transmitter, and then they activate and send their information back. Most of them only work within a ten-foot range, though some can stretch to the distance of a football field or two. Maybe there are some more powerful ones that can do more than that, but I think those women are probably just mixing desperation with wishful thinking."

"It's all a little too number of the beast for me. I bet the government and big corporations would love to keep track of where everyone is at all times. It's like when I see those stands in front of stores where they're fingerprinting and taking DNA samples of little kids to supposedly protect them, I just want to scream at the parents that the government is just entering all that information into a database to track their kids like cattle through the rest of their lives. I think they've started chipping them too, though thankfully they don't do that in front of Mart Mart."

"'Be hip! Get a chip!' Yeah, I've seen those ads. We do that at the hospital. People only used to do that for their pets in case they got lost, but now they do that for their kids too. Thankfully, people still take their pets to the vet for animal implants, though I'm surprised the vet hasn't started chipping kids too on the side. Well, people go crazy where their offspring are concerned."

"Jesus! Remind me never to have any!"

"Don't have any kids, Francine, but you can have a donut. They're on top of the refrigerator."

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel, which is available in print and as an ebook.