A woman, Paulette, picks up a locked case and has it stolen, then comes to John for help. Moretti, a dead scientist, developed chips to augment the human brain and left them to her. John accepts, believing chip-augmented brain processes may be connected to him. The trail leads to Moretti's house and a dead man – the thief, then to a on-line escort service where it turns out Paulette works. John figures out Paulette has the key on her charm bracelet and opens the case – it has a motherboard set up like a map of the city, and John and Paulette track the location to an abandoned basement being used as a lab with comatose accident victims being used as subjects in the chip experiments. Then they figure out the case contents have bar codes but when John scans them for info a hacker starts blowing up city sites through the electrical and water system and demands the case be given to him. John takes the case and tracks the hacker back to a nearby mall – it's Moretti's assistant Johansen, a religious type who feels the chip-enhancement is a blasphemy. The lab guys disappear and John breaks the bar code system, giving them a message from Moretti who has encoded his consciousness until the lab types could transplant it into a braindead body. John turns Moretti's chip over to Paulette, while we discover that the Phoenix organization is working with the lab people.