This is a story about Charlie Fieldstone, who killed the wife of the doctor who treated him for cancer. Charlie explained to many people, including those working for the police department, that a computer chip that was placed in his brain made him do this killing. He figured that this chip gave him hallucinations and much pain, especially when he failed to do exactly what he was told to do during the hallucinations. The police did not believe Charlie at first, mainly because no image of such a chip showed up on x-rays. At the time, experts, who studied computer chips that could create hallucinations, knew of many of those kinds of chips, but none of them failed to show an image on x-rays. Later in the novel, Charlie took many actions with the hope of persuading the police--and the public at large--to take seriously the notion that a computer chip might have been planted in his brain. One such action that Charlie took when his situation seemed especially desperate resulted in the breaking of his skull.