It had been a long day at work and he wanted to watch TV and relax a bit. He selected the menu of programs and like usual, started with the news. He was surprised that preview showed the Heaven Chip as the main story. He didn’t think it was really much of a story anymore. Everyone but a few fringe extremists had accepted that they were just a part of living in America and had been for about 65 years now. Every once in a while there was a story about a malfunctioning Chip going off while someone was operating some heavy machinery or something, but they really were worth the risk as far as he was concerned.
The country seemed like it was doing a lot better than places without the Chip, that’s for sure. David didn’t really believe that America was Heaven, as the full name of the Chip might imply. For one he was pretty sure there weren’t any dicks in Heaven, and there were plenty here. Plenty of ways to be a dick without doing anything illegal. But he was with the vast majority of the country that agreed they did a great job at making daily life a little better. And from what he saw on the news, it was sure better than the alternative.
He wasn’t sure exactly how they worked, despite being taught in school with everyone else, but he had a pretty good idea for a Lehman. When he was born at the local St. Anne’s a device was implanted into his brain. He was pretty sure the actual chip was in the area that dealt with feeling pain, but it was connected to the visual cortex, the frontal lobe, and everything in between. The device used the electrical signals of the brain to power itself and was always connected to AmeriNet (the national wireless internet). He wasn’t sure exactly how it knew you were committing a crime; all he knew was that it did a great job of knowing if you were. 

When David was a young teen he had accidentally shoplifted a drink once and he had never forgotten that pain. Because shoplifting was a relatively minor crime, the pain he felt was comparably minor, but it was sudden and unmistakable all the same. As soon as he took a step outside the shops door he felt a dull ache over his whole body that almost made him collapse. He jumped back in the store and apologized profusely to the man behind the counter, as if he had caused the pain or had stopped it when he came back in the door. Of course the man hadn’t and couldn’t do either, but he thanked David for coming back to pay for the drink, despite knowing that David didn’t have much of a choice. The first few minutes of the news were more of what David was expecting to see: stories about the continued deterioration of the world outside of America. After a group of religious terrorists had detonated dozens of nuclear bombs in major cities across the globe in the 2030’s things really went to shit pretty quickly. Since then the American government had become more and more religious and developed closer and closer ties to the Church to the point that the two were basically indistinguishable. Usually these stories filled up the daily news, but it seemed like they barely made the cut today. The big story was the first update to the Heaven Chip in nearly four decades. Apparently the scientists and engineers that worked in the Department of the Chip had developed a way for the Chip to “know” what emotions you were feeling. They were explaining that they had simplified emotions into a number of categories (happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy, one they had labeled “sexual”, the list was too long for David to read them all before it was gone) and the update for the Chip allowed it to assign you a number in each of these categories depending on how strongly you were feeling it. David kind of glazed over most of the technical explanations as it was mostly over his head, but he was definitely listening when they explained the implications and impacts of the update. The update was to be applied at midnight tonight over AmeriNet. David figured they must have been working on this for a while. This was definitely the first he had heard of it. His suspicions were confirmed when the voiceover went on to explain that the Legislative Body had been working with the Department of the Chip and was rolling out some new legislation to compliment the update. Law E4056, or “Commandment X” as they were calling it more often, was based on the 10th commandment. Scripture quotes were often part of the news as they transition from one story to another, after all this was the official Government news. Now David saw two such quotes on the screen:

You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. — Exodus 20:17 You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, “Do not murder,” and “anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.” But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment … You have heard that it was said, “Do not commit adultery.” But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. — Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28 (NIV)

The voiceover explained the first was the 10th commandment and the second was a quote from Jesus himself. They were explaining that until now this was the only Commandment the Government had been unable to enforce as all the other Commandments forbid specific actions and those were much easier for the Chip to detect. The 10th commandment, on the other hand, was trickier because it dealt with inner feelings, thoughts, and emotions that are far more subjective than actions. The 10th commandment was also a kind of “trump commandment”; while the 6th commandment forbids adultery, the 10th forbids the desire for adultery. The 7th forbids stealing, but the 10th forbids the desire to even have things that belong to another. Everyone on the screen seemed very excited about this huge rollout. It seemed obvious to David that this was something that had been in the works for quite a while. After the final wave of the flag and the credits started rolling David turned off the TV. He was feeling particularly patriotic. His country had made yet another huge leap forward. A great accomplishment atop a mountain of others. He wondered briefly why they waited until the last minute to make such a huge announcement. For now he was hungry and he began making his dinner. At 9pm David’s favorite sitcom ended and he began the nightly ritual of getting ready for bed. A few minutes later, as David was lying in bed waiting for the comfort of his blanket and pillow to push him down the slide of consciousness, he began thinking of Bernadette from work. They had flirted a little after the meeting today and that always got his heart going a little. They only had a meeting together every other week and he was always a bit nervous that day. There weren’t a lot of women where he worked so not only was she rare in that regard, but she had to have been one of the beautiful women David had ever seen in his life. And she was hilarious. She was funny and hot enough to star in her own sitcom as far as David was concerned. Just as David was drifting off thinking about Bernadette’s curves in all the right places and how she might look in a bikini he remembered Commandment X. He ended up not falling asleep until well after midnight after all.