San Diego - Barely

Electricity began to invade Harold's spine when he was only four-years-old. It would well up around his ass-region, and then promptly spiral upwards through his rib cage and into his heart. From there, it would shoot up his neck like a dart, causing his head to convulse viciously as a spasm of orgasmic pleasure wafted through his mind. At such moments, he envisioned the surface of his brain as a field of wheat being tickled by a cool breeze. It was a strange image, particularly because Harold had never actually seen a real field of wheat in his life.

Harold lived in a large glass dome. To be more accurate, Harold lived in Dome 132-AAB. He didn't live in Dome 132-AAB by himself, but shared the dome with about 1000 like-minded individuals who weren't really keen on experiencing the life of a rotisserie chicken, which is what would have been their fate had they been outside the dome. An even more accurate statement would be that Harold lived in cell 312-A13 of Dome 132-AAM on the continent of what was once called Africa.

Cell 312-A13 was physically, the size of a closet, and virtually, the size of a mansion. Harold preferred his virtual house to his actual house, but fortunately for him, he did not really have to spend any time in his actual house except for the few minutes it took for him to plug-out in the morning and plug back in when he returned from work in the evening.

If those whose privilege it was to make decisions had ordained that Harold should be a scientist or an engineer instead of a searcher, he wouldn't have had to spend any time in reality at all. Instead of being a class C citizen, he would have been a class B citizen: existing entirely in virtuality. Although Harold sometimes felt privileged to be fundamentally different from most of society, being that he was one of the few individuals who actually felt reality, he sometimes wondered if it might have been better to live entirely in virtuality seeing as how reality kind of sucked.

As mentioned before, reality for Harold consisted of Dome 132-AAM and Cell 312-A13. As a searcher, he worked mainly outside of Dome 132-AAM, contending with sheets of sand whipping into his facemask as he collected samples of bacteria that had managed to survive the brutal environmental conditions. The hope was that the Geneticists would someday be able to isolate the exact genes on the living bacteria. Then, place these genes into the next generation of humans, allowing the next generation to again walk the Earth.

Harold's house in reality wasn't even really a house; it was more of a doorway. When Harold passed through the doorway, he was immersed in a world of blue skies and fields of virtual wheat that would sway as though they were being tickled by cool breezes, which brings us back to the electricity that had been invading Harold's spine for the past twenty years.

When Harold was four years old, his childcare steward, a robot named Lula designed to train Class C citizens, had asked him why he was so adorable. The motivation behind Lulu's pre-programmed compliment was to instill a sense of confidence within Harold, so that he would one day be able to withstand sheets of sand whipping into his facemask without cracking and running into the endless wastelands like a raving lunatic.

As Lulu smiled robotically at Harold, patiently anticipating one of about 100,000,000 potential responses that had been programmed into her compliment-response database, Harold thought to himself, "How transient these feelings of pleasure swirling around my soul at this piece of metal's compliment."

He then looked into Lula's robotic eyes and replied with all sincerity, "What is adorable? Is it my body that is adorable, because I assure you that if you look in other temporal directions, you will see the paucity of logic in your statement. This body may be adorable now, but I shall grow old and one day I will die and my body will degrade into the earth from where it came. As maggots dine on my rotting corpse, will you then question the integrity of your compliment?"

Lula stared at Harold as her cognitive programming vainly searched through her massive databases for an appropriate response. As Lulu stood there, motionless, an amusing thing happened: the futility of her cognitive program spurred an emergency measure within her internal operating system that diverted all power into the various programs that were desperately searching her many databases. The shift of power caused her limbs to droop, her back to slouch, and her jaw to loosen to the point that she began to resemble a Neanderthal woman, jaw agape.

Thankfully for Lula, an authority entity took over at that point in time and fed her a command. Straightening her back, she promptly told Harold that it was naptime.

Truth be told, it wasn't really Harold's fault that he was so bizarre, he was just remarkably deficient at existing on a constantly moving vector through time. Things were substantially worse for Harold when he came into contact with other humans.

In her human-behavior class, Professor Berg had been teaching her students about how humans had once imagined a concept of heaven in which a bunch of good-looking people flew around and sat on clouds.

"Now," she began. "We understand that the concept of heaven was a neuro-chemical response created by the brain to counter the effects of despair - nothing more than an evolutionary mechanism."

As Professor Berg spoke, a tremor began to grow within Harold's loins and soon, the familiar electricity shot through his spine and he suddenly knew that the concept of heaven was entirely possible within the confines of reality, it was just a matter of perception.

In the expanse of a sigh, it became steadily obvious to him that he would eventually die and while maggots dined on his rotting corpse, an instant would explode into infinity and his consciousness would be freed from the confines of time and space. He would reunite with God in a relationship that mirrored perfection. So, except for the good-looking people with wings part, it would be heaven.

When Harold decided to share his tasty little nugget of insight with the rest of the class, they burst into obnoxious laughter. Even Professor Berg could not prevent a smirk from creeping onto her face.

Harold looked down at his desk, dejected. He could comprehend metaphysical truths with an intuition that was beyond anyone else, but he could not relate to entities who shared his flesh. Harold managed to contain himself through the rest of the lecture, but when Professor Berg started babbling on about the irrationality of a concept of "God," he couldn't hold back any longer.

"God?" he shouted. "We are God, don't you realize that? The process of dissolving our ego is our search to reunite with the concept of joining in with divinity. We are God when we realize that we aren't ourselves, but part of a spontaneously occurring phenomenon!"

Although the first outburst was an acceptable aberration of behavior, Professor Berg was not accustomed to hearing such ignorance from eight-year-old children with such consistency. She promptly placed Harold in the Beneficial Alteration Chamber (BAC) for a few hours, where he was subjected to a delightful headdress of electrodes that was intended to strategically stimulate various parts of his brain and teach him the valuable lesson of respecting the thoughts and ideas of others, and the even more valuable lesson of keeping one's mouth shut.

After Harold had been properly dealt with, Professor Berg spent a moment wondering what had gone wrong with Harold's genetic sequencing and why orders had come from above to proceed with Harold's training as a Class C citizen. With his brash behavior and unorthodox logic, wouldn't it have made more sense for Harold to have been placed in the Virtual Zoo, where he could be put on display as an example of unproductive behavior? Professor Berg shook such thoughts from her head as she remembered the lovely effects of the beneficial alteration chamber, where she had just placed Harold. Everything would turn out fine with this one and he would become a first-rate Searcher, she told herself as she returned to her attentive and compliant class.

Although the beneficial alteration chamber was given a prime grade effectiveness rating, it was remarkably incapable of affecting Harold. While the electrodes were impotently bouncing messages around Harold's brain, he made the decision that he did not really enjoy this special treatment and would take all possible measures to avoid it in the future.