Years ago, Zi Teng Wang, a magician and molecular biologist from Missouri, had the idea of spicing up his magic tricks by implanting a small RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chip in his palm. It sounded great in theory. An audience member would touch their smartphone to his palm during a show to activate a certain magic trick, but it didn’t work out that well in real life, so he eventually gave up on it.

“It turns out that repeatedly touching someone else’s phone to my hand, trying to figure out where the device’s RFID reader is, doesn’t seem very mysterious, magical, or amazing,” Wang recently wrote on Facebook. “And often people also disable that reader, while using my own phone for the reading doesn’t have the same impact, for obvious reasons.”

At one point, he started experimenting with the chip located between his thumb and forefinger, pairing it with a Bitcoin address and linking it to a meme on image-storing website Imgur. Eventually, he forgot all about it, until a while ago when the Imgur link suddenly went online. He decided to reprogram the chip again, only to realize he had forgotten the password for it.

“At least the Imgur link is working again,” Wang joked. “But I’m still locked out of my own body’s technology, which is inconvenient but hilarious.”

The young magician says he asked his tech-savvy friends for a solution, and the only viable answer was that he basically had to “stick an RFID reader to the palm of his hand for days or weeks” and “try every possible combination by brute force.”

Zi Teng Wang’s story, while humorous, has sparked an online debate about biohacking in general, especially as companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are getting close to shipping brain chips to the general public. But companies go out of business, products get discontinued, or users simply forget the passwords for their implanted devices.