Pei had no natural sense of hearing, but the auditory-processing implant embedded in her forehead allowed her to cognitively register sound and understand its associated meaning (the sensation was something like reading, but without a screen present). Vital as this need was in a galaxy where everyone else insisted on carrying out vibratory conversations delivered via air, the implant could not communicate the sound’s direction in the same neural way that it relayed the sound itself. This simply wasn’t something a non-hearing brain could comprehend. To accommodate for this, the implant gave her
...more
