Some crazy scientists or other are trying to make quasi-organic computer chips, a technology which plays a small but sinister role in my Star Master duology: https://newatlas.com/computers/human-brain-chip-ai/

Some excerpts from my novels below the cut.

Relevant quotes from Shadow Captain:

“I had one of those new debit chips implanted here.” Prasati tapped the back of her head. “I can go to a store, maybe buy a pair of shoes, and the merchant does a deepscan for the chip. Then he takes what I owe him off the chip. Every payday, I go to the syndicate’s bursar, and he reloads the chip with what I’ve earned. You didn’t have that done too?”
Essem shook his head. “I know the syndicate offered that as a payment option about six months ago,” he said. “I told them thanks, but no thanks.”
Until this conversation with Prasati, he hadn’t paid much attention to who had agreed to be chipped, and who hadn’t. It was none of his business.
“Huh, I think you were the only one on the ship who didn’t. Why didn’t you want to do it?” she asked.
“Well, for one thing, I didn’t see why they would need to stick the thing all the way inside my skull, instead of just under the skin,” Essem began.
“Don’t be silly! If they just injected the chips under the skin, a thief could knock you out and steal the chip. With it inside the skull, they’d have to kill you to get it.”
“What makes you think that would stop them?” Essem asked. He didn’t mean to be patronizing. He was trying to get her to understand the implications of what she was saying.
“They’d go to prison for a lot longer if they killed you! They might even be executed, although that’s not so common anymore.”
A thief who’s willing to knock a mark unconscious isn’t likely to balk at murder, no matter what the penalties are, Essem thought.
“It just seems to me as though a chip inside the brain could be…misused,” he told Prasati.
“The design was approved by the High Council themselves,” Prasati said indignantly. “It’s a similar design to what they use for the indenture chips, but these are made of organic materials.”
Essem winced. His father had never approved of the indenture laws, and Essem was inclined to agree with him. It seemed too much like slavery, an evil practice best left in the past.
“What? You have a problem with the indenture laws, too?” Prasati demanded. “Who’s side are you on, anyway? “
Her eyes were bright with a cold, predatory light. He could almost see her calculating whether Deshraat would believe her if she told him that Essem were secretly a Partisan.

***

The automated door into the ready room slid back abruptly without a warning chime, as if it had been forced open. Deshraat stalked into the room, flanked by Prasati and the ship’s security chief. Their eyes were blank and empty, and Essem knew at once that the Red Knight had bent their minds. The ship’s other medic trailed behind Deshraat, his eyes as blank as Prasati’s.
Meshet lunged at the Red Knight, but there was a sickening crack and he fell to the floor at Deshraat’s feet. The Red Knight had broken Meshet’s neck without touching him.
Deshraat pointedly stepped on the body as he moved up to the desk, trampling Meshet under foot. Essem was paralyzed. He felt like every part of his body was trapped in a tightening vise, that squeezed his hands just as hard as it squeezed his chest and his throat.
“Your pilot was a useful man, until he learned what I used to be,” Deshraat told him. “These fools standing behind me were not so useful, so I took control of them. The debit chips in their heads made it easy.”
“Is that what those chips are really for?” Essem asked. “To control people?”
“Yes, although the older model indenture chips are not so useful. Those are electromechanical, and can only be activated by a cybermancer. They can inflict pain on the wearer, nothing more. These debit chips are organic, and any mindbender trained as a biomancer can use them.”
Essem grimaced. Biomancy was one of the most common psychic skillsets, allowing the user to alter living things or objects made out of organic materials.
“You may not have a soul any more than the rest of them do,” Deshraat went on, “But you’re a clever animal. As long as you are useful to me, and keep my secrets, I will let you live.” The vise grip on Essem’s throat and chest eased a little. “Do you understand?”
Essem choked out an acknowledgment. I no longer have a choice, he thought bitterly. I can either be a martyr or a slave, and I’m not martyr material.
“No, you aren’t,” Deshraat said, once again reading his thoughts. “But a good slave is too valuable to abuse, Captain. I advise you to be a good slave.”
“I guess I’ll have to be,” Essem answered bitterly.

Relevant quotes from Spider Star:

“I think I see the chip this time,” Lanati told Roukazor. With the first two patients, she’d been too nervous to focus properly.
“Good. Do you want to try disabling it?” Roukazor asked briskly. He was not rude about it, but he made it clear that he wished she would hurry up and master this technique. At times like this, it was easy to see why he’d left the White Knights. In the old days, they had laid great emphasis on teaching other psychics how to use their powers, and Roukazor was no teacher.
Lanati addressed herself to their patient. “Is it alright if I try to fix this for you, or would you rather my colleague handle this?”
The old man looked up at her with a weary determination in his eyes. “I’ve seen what having these things did to other people. I’d rather die having it removed, than live with it in me.”
Lanati took a deep breath and refocused on the tiny slice of organic material implanted at the base of his brain. She tightened her focus, and could see the blood vessels which fed oxygen to the control chip. She tightened her focus again, on the places where the blood vessels connected to the chip. She willed one of those connections to close. For a moment, nothing happened, and then the wall of the blood vessel just…grew shut, cutting off the flow of blood to the chip at that point. She tried again, with another connection point, and again it worked. She continued as she had begun, until she thought all the blood vessels were closed. Then she broke focus.

***

Khopesh was in his study reviewing some documents, when the door chimed.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened and his youngest daughter, Lesepi, walked in.
“Is it alright if I ask you something, Father?”
“Of course, he said. What’s on your mind?”
Mentally, he braced himself for whatever was coming next. Lesepi was only sixteen, and before Essem’s disappearance, she had been the main cause for worry in Khopesh’s private life. Not so much because she was wild or rebellious, but because she didn’t get along with her classmates, and she always seem to be bullied or picked on. The school refused to do anything about it, no matter how hard Lesepi’s mother pushed, and Khopesh’s long absences meant that there was even less he could do about it.
Lesepi strolled into the room and plunked herself down in a chair on the opposite side of Khopesh’s desk. She probably thought she looked casual and unworried, but Khopesh knew her too well to be fooled.
Once she was seated, the words came out in a rush. “Mother says this is something I have to figure out for myself, and I will, but I wanted to have someone to bounce ideas off of.”
“Yes,” Khopesh said, trying to sound encouraging.
“My classmates all want to get credit chips installed in their brains,” she added.
“Interesting,” Khopesh said. He kept his voice neutral.
“I know you don’t really approve of that, but we’ve never talked about why. My teachers and classmates all want me to get the chip.”
Khopesh resisted the urge to tell her at great length why he disapproved of the credit chips. Instead, he asked: “Do you want the chip?”
She shook her head. “Not really, but I don’t know what to say to them about it.”
“Well, let’s start with why you don’t want to do that.”
“To me, it just seems kind of pointless and gross. You’re letting someone cut into your skull and stick some kind of organic computer chip inside…and for what? Just so store your digital wallet so securely that nobody can steal it?”
“I’ve heard that the newer models allow you to mentally access your account balance without using a machine,” Khopesh said. “But it still seems like convenience is the main selling point.”
“So you think it’s pointless, too?” She smiled in relief.
Khopesh wondered what kind of reasons she had imagined him as having for being opposed to the process. It wouldn’t be the first time one of his children had assumed his reasons for doing something were completely stupid. Young people tended to make assumptions like that, and some older people as well.
“Pointless is a good word for it,” he said.
“You probably don’t think it’s gross, though. You’re a military man.”
Khopesh shrugged. “A lot of medical procedures strike non-doctors as distasteful, for lack of a better word. Such procedures are particularly distasteful when the benefits are limited, and the potential risks unstudied.”
Lesepi looked aghast. “You mean they haven’t tested this on vat-grown organs or anything like that?”
“I read up on the development of the chipping process. It grew out of the process for installing chips of inorganic silicate in the heads of indentured servants,” Khopesh said. He didn’t even bother keeping the disgust out of his voice. His entire family knew what he thought about the indenture laws.
“But the organic circuit chips are a new thing, weren’t they?” Lesepi asked.
“They still are,” Khopesh said. “Vat-grown organics are not a recent development, but growing electronic devices out of organic materials…that technology is in its infancy. The preliminary trials for the credit chips involved implanting them in a few dozen test organs, less than a hundred all told. Those trials wrapped up just before that bank hacking scandal. Do you remember that one?”
Lesepi rolled her eyes. “How could I forget? It was all over the news, and the teachers were having hysterics about how it would crash the whole economy of Settled Space. It was one chain of banks. How bad could it be?”
“Well, it was bad enough, but as you noted, not bad enough to destroy our economy. The worst part of it was that the High Council made it an excuse for pushing the chipping process on people, and waived all the additional trials.”
Lesepi’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Is it true that the chief executive of the company that developed the process is the wife of a man on the High Council?”
Khopesh nodded. “I don’t recommend bringing that part up with your classmates, but it is true. Quite a conflict of interest. And that’s why, even though I serve the High Council, I don’t trust the government to make sound decisions on this particular topic.”
I backed the High Council and its decision to create the Star Navy because I thought all our star systems needed more unity, and less corruption, he thought bitterly. Now the Partisans’ rebellion is in full bloom, and the High Council is doing things like this. So much for unity and honesty in politics!
Lesepi stood up. “Thank you for listening, Father,” she said. “I feel like that helped me put my own thoughts in order. I know what to tell them now.”
He smiled at her. “That’s what parents are for,” he said.
She smiled back at him, and came around the desk to give him a kiss on the cheek.