[Sigh. It's okay, buddy. Hiro's got your back on this one.]

These are computer chips. Well, data chips, more accurately. They're little pieces of technology that hold all sorts of information and are used to program things to perform a lot of different functions or save a lot of information. These ones were found in a bunch of library books and we found out they were emitting a signal that was able to control all of us. That's why everybody who read the books went sort of crazy.