"Did I hear you correctly?" said the astonished Zapp.
"I said, there's a microchip implanted in your frontal lobe," said Zoidberg, showing the brain scanner's display to the captain. "Is that what you heard?"
Zapp stared unblinkingly at the magnetic image of his brain, and the unmistakable tiny black rectangle near the front. "Holy mother of God!" he exclaimed. "How did that get inside my head?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," said Zoidberg. "Well, not quite as good, since I'm a doctor and you're not."
Zapp stood up from the bed and started to pace, deep in troubled thought. "I get a routine scan every month to check for brain slug larvae," he muttered. "The last one was two weeks ago, and it was clean. Since then I've escorted the Grumbian ambassador to a peace conference, engaged in ritual sex with said ambassador, protected a fleet of science vessels in the Cerulean Nebula, been captured and brainwashed by space pirates, checked myself into a mental institution, undergone several failed treatments and one successful treatment which I can't even remember, enjoyed a dinner date with the lovely, luscious Leela, and boarded a ship full of half-wits on a mission to the Azaria system. Somewhere over the course of that long list of accomplishments, I ended up with a chip in my brain."
"It must've been the successful treatment," said Leela through Fry's mouth, "since you can't remember what happened."
"I wouldn't be so sure," said Zapp. "I passed out during the ritual sex."
"You say the voice didn't start speaking to you until after you received the cure," Zoidberg postulated. "Perhaps, therefore, the chip is the cure."
Zapp pondered the doctor's statement for a long moment. "I don't recall undergoing surgery," he said, "but it's always possible that the surgeon implanted fake memories of being strapped in a chair with my eyes pried open, listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."
"Let's try an experiment, shall we?" said Zoidberg, his eyes lighting up. "Raven, I'd like to request a selection of classical music."
"Please specify composer, name of composition, opus number, conductor, and ensemble," said the ship's computer voice.
"Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no. 9 in D Minor, Opus 125," said Zoidberg. "As for the rest, surprise me."
A split second later, the speakers in the medical bay's ceiling burst forth with Beethoven's famous Ode to Joy chorus. As Leela and Zoidberg hummed along to the familiar tune, Zapp felt a buildup of pain and horror within his mind. Three measures later he was clutching his head in agony.
"Turn it off!" he pleaded. "For God's sake, turn it off!"
Raven instantly complied, and the music ended. Zoidberg and Leela saw Zapp on his knees, pale and panting. "Very interesting," remarked the lobster.
"So much pain," Zapp mumbled deliriously. "I couldn't move. I couldn't think. There was nothing but the pain, and the darkness, and…and that music."
"Cool, another Kurt Cobain fan!" said Fry, walking into the sickbay in Leela's body.
Bender followed close behind. "Keep it down in here!" the robot demanded. "I'm trying to play Tetris in my head."
Amy was the next to enter. "What is this, Japanese New Year's?" said the Asian girl, whose hair was set with square curlers.
"I'm glad you're all here," said Zoidberg to Bender, Leela, Fry, Amy, and the recovering Zapp. "As you can plainly see, our dear Captain Brannigan is experiencing flashbacks of a torturous ordeal he endured while being forced to listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."
"You mean a classical music concert?" said Fry.
"No, my one-eyed friend," was Zoidberg's response. "'Twas something even more sinister—a diabolical act of surgery by which the normal operation of his brain was altered by the introduction of a microprocessor."
"Could you possibly restate that in slang?" Fry asked him.
"If you insist," said the doctor. "The captain has been…zombie-chipped."
Gasps went up from Leela, Amy, and Bender. "I thought that was just an urban legend," said Leela in wonder.
"An urban legend?" said Fry excitedly. "You mean like the guy who goes into a bar, and somebody slips him a mickey, and the next thing he knows, he's sitting in a tub of ice water, and his kidneys are gone?"
"That was no legend," Amy told him. "The Bush Administration declared a War on Organ Harvesting right after it won the War on Terror."
"I guess Fry's never heard of the zombie chip," said Leela—much to the surprise of Zapp, who wondered why Fry was referring to himself in the third person. "Three years ago a story appeared in all the tabloid magazines, claiming that President McNeil had been abducted by hostile aliens and surgically altered with a microchip that forced him to obey their commands. There was no evidence to back up the claim, but a lot of people believed it anyway, and some even formed resistance cells. Everything became normal again after McNeil called in alien troops to crush the resistance, but ever since then, the term 'zombie chip' has come to mean any kind of technology planted inside a person's brain to control their behavior."
"In my case," said Zapp, "perhaps the chip is intended to suppress feelings of aggression."
"You need a zombie chip to do that?" Bender marveled. "All I have to do is flip a switch." To demonstrate, he reached into his chest cavity, fiddled with the settings, and then tenderly placed his arm around Zoidberg's shoulders. "I've never told you how much I truly appreciate you," he said.
"It's starting to make sense now," said Zapp thoughtfully. "The person who was speaking to me obviously has the power to remotely deactivate the chip. When he did so temporarily, I was overwhelmed by Balalaika's thirst for blood, and I nearly murdered Dr. Zoidberg."
"I knew it, I did!" said the crustacean.
"That's horrible!" exclaimed Leela. "He can make you do whatever he wants, or threaten to set you loose on the people you care about!"
"It's the ultimate form of blackmail," Zapp remarked solemnly. "And until I find a way to free myself entirely from his influence, I can never set foot on Earth again."
To be continued
