Unlike the mainstream, commercial MEMs, this one didn't come in a pretty black box with shiny silver lettering. The meager and illegible instructions were printed on the back of some sort of financial accounting sheet, and the whole thing was squeezed into a small plastic box. The chip itself, barely an eighth of an inch thick, was hidden beneath a fancy reflective surface, safe from random police searches and curious passers-by.

Kevin really couldn't know what he was buying for certain; these black market chips lack both the author's sign and the company's logo, no serial number, no proof of purchase, no nothing. In fact, there was no reason to think that the chip was anything but part of an old calculator.

Generally, though, the illegal chips are anything but useless.