Worry no more, doting parents! Whether it's your little pumpkin's first day walking home from school by herself or the millionth time you've lost her at the mall, the Babysitter^TM will track your sweetpea's location from a jelly bean-sized microchip implant, discreetly tucked under her collarbone.

Also available: The Constant Companion^TM lets you keep a watchful eye on grandma or grandpa, even when you can't be by their side. Coming soon: The INS Border Patroller^TM; the Personal Private Eye^TM; the Micro-Manager^TM.

Alas, this is not as far-fetched or as futuristic as it sounds. The notion of surveillance chips being installed in human beings is poised to cross over from the realm of science fiction into everyday reality, and soon. One technology with the sci-fi name of Digital Angel, a prototype of which will be unveiled in October, could be implanted under the skin and used to monitor not only the chip-wearer's location, but vital signs like heart rate and body temperature. Other devices, worn externally like bracelets or pagers, are already in use and invite us to embrace electronic monitoring in specific environments--like a theme park, college campus or construction site--for our fun, health or safety.

What's disturbing is just how quickly these devices, which only recently would have been laughed off as a cyborg fantasy, are becoming accepted. Amazingly, it was but two years ago that a British cybernetics professor pulled what then seemed like a futuristic stunt; temporarily installing electronics in his arm to control his computer remotely.

Now having a personal chip is becoming, well, not quite the norm but a ready possibility. Kevin Warwick, the cybernetics prof, says, "As the topic becomes more accessible in the media, people get used to the idea; it's not such a frightening thing … If it's not there this year, it's only a year or two downstream." A Japanese firm is already testing chips to track lost relatives.

With commercial interests hard at work to spread the gospel of human tracking and monitoring--voluntarily, and for our own good, of course--and others normalizing chip implantation, it might not be too soon to start preparing for a whole new silicon craze.

Officials at Digital Angel brush off concerns about privacy by promising that the chip-wearer will be able to control when he or she is switched on or off, although they won't yet say how exactly that will work. The Digital Angel Web site puts it bluntly: "The unit … will not intrude on personal privacy except in applications applied to the tracking of criminals."

Maybe so, but the potential for abuse is so ludicrously high that it's almost impossible to overstate. But like almost everyone else I talked to in this field, Applied Digital Systems' CEO Sullivan dismisses nagging doubts about what it means to literally wire ourselves up. "Some of the things that have made the most positive contributions to our lives are the things that there are the most concern about. Like any technology, it's really in the hands of the user," he says.

Some see the chipification of humans as all but inevitable. Chris Hables Gray, professor, self-proclaimed "cyborgologist" and author of the forthcoming book Cyborg Citizen, says that it really doesn't matter whether or not the "Digital Angel" flies. "If this company doesn't do it, someone else will," he says. And watch out when they do.

"They will start implanting them in prisoners, parolees, child abusers, sex offenders and drunk drivers," he predicts. Gray says that it's been a military project for some 20 years to find a way to track every soldier on the battlefield. Remember when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh complained about having been a part of a Gulf War experiment that implanted a chip in his butt?

Conspiracy theories aside, it's alarming how quickly a new technological "option" becomes a requirement. The microchipping of pets is a case in point. More than 670,000 animals--including no less than 134,007 cats, 54 pot-bellied pigs and five emu--have been enrolled in the American Kennel Club microchip program since it began.

Researchers have created a fish on wheels. Actually, they took part of the brain of a lamprey, an aquatic parasite, and connected it to a mobile robot, producing what they call an "artificial animal." It was the first time, researchers said, that animal brain cells and a robot had communicated in two directions.

Dr. Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi, an associate professor at the Northwestern University Medical School, and a team of researchers from universities in the United States and Italy say that they were able to control the motion of a two-wheeled robot by connecting it to the brain stem of the sea lamprey. Depending on the placement of the electrode on the brain tissue, the robot moved toward or away from the light, or in a circle.

The aim of the research is to see how the brain's circuits change and adapt to different stimuli. The method, however, is unquestionably eerie.

Linking a life form and a machine may make some people squirm, but Dr. Mussa-Ivaldi insists that the system may have practical benefits. "Our goal is to create a tool that will hopefully help us understand how the brain works," he said.

Steve Grand, the chief executive of a British research and development company that is trying to create forms of synthetic life, said such work could be justified by its potential benefits. "People are sometimes fearful that artificial life research will reduce us all to machines and explain away our souls," he said. "On the contrary, I believe it will give us a new understanding and a new respect for ourselves, as the most sublime machines in the known universe."

First, they appeared in computers. Then they went into clocks, calculators, and coffeemakers. Now they are popping up in credit cards, car windshields, running shoes—and even pets.

Ultimately, say technology experts, they will be embedded in people to track their health, résumés, and whereabouts.

"They" are silicon chips. And as these tiny objects get smaller and smarter, they are bringing about more changes in the way we live. For example:

• Britain recently passed a law granting special privileges to foreign pets implanted with silicon ID chips. If the chip indicates a pet’s vaccines are up to date, the animal can come into the country without the usual six-month quarantine.
• Running shoes equipped with computer chips can adjust the shoes’ cushioning based on whether the wearer is running or walking.
• Last September, American Express introduced the Blue Card—a credit card with an electronic chip that acts as a checking account for Internet purchases. The chip stores financial data and works much like the magnetic strips on the back of other credit cards. But it holds much more data, lasts longer, and is more secure from thieves.
• Travelers on Virginia toll roads can have tolls debited from their bank accounts via chips embedded in windshield stickers.
• And that's just the beginning...

Ultimately chips could migrate under our skin, though the ethical and humanitarian implications remain unclear. In 1996, Professor Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading in Britain had a chip put in his arm that could unlock doors, turn on lights, and boot up his computer.

All the technology needed for chips to interact directly with humans is already available, says Gene France, a senior fellow at Texas Instruments in Dallas. "All we have to do is figure out how to get them not to be so clunky."

"If I could just download [commands] from my brain, that would be kind of exciting," says Mr. France. "I’ve always maintained that someday [knowing] calculus will be a matter of sticking your hand on an electrode pad…. For cellphones, I’d like to be able to just stick this little [chip] in my ear."

Another obstacle is power. Today’s batteries are too big, heavy, expensive, and don’t last long enough to run embedded chips. "My goal," says France, "is to reduce power requirements so the chips can run off body heat. France bases his prediction on Moore’s Law, which states that computer chips double in capacity, while halving in size and price, every 18 months.

"He causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six."—Revelation 13:16–18.

I have always wondered about this passage in the biblical Book of Revelation. How would people ever be made to accept such a "mark of the beast" or to accept the implantation of some sinister computer chip in their bodies?

If and when such a terrifying future scenario would begin to unfold, I figured—when the "antichrist" and his operatives would try to mandate the mass acceptance of this "mark"—there would be massive rebellion. Everyone would just say, "Hey, dude, didn’t you ever hear of a little thing called the Bible? The Book of Revelation? So get out of my face, ‘cause I’m not interested in obtaining eternal damnation. Have a nice day."

Ah, that was then. Little did I know the day would come when traditional Christianity would be under such severe assault, its basic precepts so maligned, its adherents so demonized that the nightmarish scenario predicted in Revelation could not only come about, but be welcomed with open arms.

Little did I know that the once super-secret Echelon surveillance network would be capable of monitoring any e-mail and phone conversation anywhere on earth, and that soon people’s location will be trackable through their cellular phones.

And now, here comes the Digital Angel—the new, dime-sized implantable transceiver whose manufacturer, Applied Digital Solutions, intends its global use for the tracking and monitoring of humans. Emitting a homing beacon that can be tracked by global positioning system satellites, it is being marketed as the ultimate, tamper-proof means of personal identification. When implanted in your body, the device is powered electromechanically through the movement of muscles, and it can be activated either by the "wearer" or by a monitoring facility.

"A few years ago there may have been resistance, but not anymore," Dr. Peter Zhou, chief scientist for development of the implant and president of ADS subsidiary DigitalAngel.net Inc. told WorldNetDaily. "People are getting used to having implants. New century, new trend."

Zhou compared Digital Angel to pacemakers. Pacemakers used to be seen as bizarre, said Zhou, but now they are part of everyday life. Digital Angel will be received the same way, he added.

"Fifty years from now this will be very, very popular. Fifty years ago the thought of a cell phone, where you could walk around talking on the phone, was unimaginable. Now they are everywhere," Zhou explained. Just like the cell phone, Digital Angel "will be a connection from yourself to the electronic world. It will be your guardian, protector. It will bring good things to you."

In a spine-tingling comment on mankind’s future, Zhou added, "We will be a hybrid of electronic intelligence and our own soul."

Now I am not claiming Digital Angel is the tool of the antichrist. But I am saying emphatically that, if it is, the world is just about ready for it.

A few years ago, could you have predicted that in the year 2000 a major Republican presidential candidate would call two of the best-known evangelical Christian ministers in the country—Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell—"agents of intolerance"? Would you have believed that the White House press secretary, Joe Lockhart, would publicly equate Christians evangelizing people of other faiths with perpetuating "ancient religious hatred"? Would you ever have thought that "new research" would show, in the biblical story of David and Goliath, that it wasn’t David’s faith in God that won the day. It was the fact, as Vladimir Berginer, professor of neurology at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University argues, that Goliath was actually suffering from a disease of the pituitary gland called acromegaly, which caused a tumor to swell against Goliath’s optic nerve. Poor Goliath, it turns out, was vision-impaired.

If the unproven and fraud-ridden theory of evolution can be used so effectively to undermine the first book of the Bible; and if a university professor can claim without evidence of any sort that Goliath couldn’t see well—and the international media report this as news; then the dark, foreboding and allegorical last book of the Bible should be child’s play to discredit.

And whereas a generation ago Christianity was the dominant culture in America, and the homosexual world a seamy subculture, could you have guessed that today the homosexual activists’ political agenda would have become accepted and supported in almost every sector of society, while Christianity would be openly and freely demonized?

But the blame for all this does not rest on homosexuals or those hostile to Christianity.

Many nominal Christians of today have the appearance and words of faith, but deep down are no different than the "heathen" they wish to evangelize. Many Christians have become so shallow, so worldly, so self-satisfied, and so corrupt that they have long ago lost the original innocence and brightness they had as children.

They embrace the practice of abortion, viewing it as a necessary health procedure, a fundamental right, an equalizing factor between women and men, even an advancement in their quality of life. They don’t see that it perfectly parallels the satanic ritual of sacrificing an innocent child on the altar of selfishness and lust. They’ve lost their spiritual discernment, and all they have left is the outward appearance of being religious.

Their belief system, instead of upgrading their lives, justifies their sin. They see themselves as having a sort of spiritual "diplomatic immunity." They are saved, after all, and therefore can do what they want with impunity, with no fear of spiritual law enforcement authorities.

They are saved, so to hell with everybody and everything else. They’re waiting for the rapture, and enjoying God’s piecemeal judgment of the world. They have almost completely lost the ability to recognize evil as evil, and to oppose it—not with anger, but with love and strength, as Jesus did. Without real virtue, all that’s left is hypocrisy, and Christianity in America today is full of it.

Yes, the truth is, when the terrible time foretold in Revelation comes, most people probably won’t even notice this manifestation of ultimate evil. After all, we’ve had a lot of practice.

A tracking device designed to be inserted under the skin could allow parents to keep tabs on their children, help courts track offenders or make it easy to find lost hikers.

A prototype, dubbed the Digital Angel (DA), is being developed by Applied Digital Solutions of Florida. The device contains a miniature global positioning system (GPS) receiver, which uses tiny differences in timing signals from satellites to calculate its position on Earth. The device can broadcast this information to a local receiver. It gets its power from a piezoelectric device that converts energy from a person's normal movements into electricity stored in a small battery.

The device, which will be the size of a small coin, would be implanted just under the skin. Most of the time it would be inactive. But a mechanical switch--or a timed series of muscular contractions--could trigger it. Even a tune would do the trick.

It will also be possible to trigger the device remotely using a coded radio signal. This would be useful in the case of a lost child or kidnap victim. And the authorities could activate the Digital Angel to track down a prisoner on the run.

Civil liberties groups are concerned. "This kind of stuff has enormous potential for abuse by the authorities, or by anyone who can break into the information," says Emily Whitfield, a spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union. She worries that the devices could become widespread, allowing governments to monitor their citizens. And she speculates that criminals could crack the codes needed to activate and use the devices, allowing them to pinpoint, say, potential kidnap victims.

A blind man can read large letters and navigate around big objects by using a tiny camera wired directly to his brain, the first artificial eye to provide useful vision. A research report says the 62-year-old man doesn't see an image. He perceives up to 100 specks of light that appear and disappear, like stars that come and go behind passing clouds, as his field of vision shifts.

But as he showed a reporter last week, that's enough to let him find a mannequin in a room, walk to a black stocking cap hanging on a white wall, and then return to the mannequin and put the cap on its head. He can recognize a five-centimeter-tall letter from 1.5 meters away, said researcher William Dobelle.

The man, who asked to be identified only as Jerry, has been blind for 25 years. He volunteered for the study and underwent the brain implant in 1978; scientists have been working since then to improve the software.