Some magicians go to absurd lengths to set up new and unexpected tricks, but many can say that they've altered their own bodies with new forms of technology in search of the ultimate illusion.
Gone are the days when pulling a rabbit out of a hat was the most impressive thing that a magician could do, and you now have to come up with often weird ways to stand out amongst the crowd.
Zi Teng Wang believed that he'd found the perfect method for doing this with a rather extreme measure, as he decided to implant an RFID chip inside his hand that would give him the power to 'control' people's phones.
Everything soon went pear-shaped though as not only did the trick itself fall relatively flat, but he's now managed to lock himself out of his 'hand' by forgetting the password to the chip, as reported by Dexerto.
Advert
The trick itself involved Wang pressing his hand up to an audience member's phone in order to active their RFID reader with his own chip, sending them to whatever internet address he's programmed it to.
In theory it would appear as if he'd taken control of their gadgets with the wave of a hand, but in practice it was relatively clunk and utterly unimpressive, as Wang himself explains in a new Facebook post.
"It turns out that pressing someone else's phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone's RFID reader is, really doesn't come off as super mysterious and magical and amazing," he illustrated.
What's worse, in most cases the trick didn't even work, as the magician asserts: "Often people have that reader disabled too, while using my own phone for the scan also lacks the oomph for the obvious reasons."
After rewriting the link it would send the targeted phone to a number of times, he went to do it again recent only to discover the horror that he'd forgotten his own password, in what Wang himself calls his "own cyberpunk dystopia life."
It appears as if the only solution is to "strap on an RFID reader for days to weeks, brute forcing every possible combination," but that's obvious not an ideal solution to what is undoubtedly a nightmare.
He revealed that the link that he was attempting to change it from had thankfully started working again, but he's "still locked out of my own body's tech, and that's inconvenient but hilarious."
This wouldn't necessarily be an issue if the 'magic' itself had proven to be successful, but now he's just stuck with a chip in his hand that serves as a mediocre party trick at best and a reminder of failure at worst.