Qualityland

* * * QualityLand * * *

Your Personal Travel Guide

EARWORMS

As you stroll through the streets of QualityLand, you will probably notice people chattering away to themselves, yet seemingly without headsets on. Contrary to how it may appear, these people are not crazy. Or at least, not all of them are. Most of them are talking to their personal digital assistants, via the so-called earworm. The earworm is a small, worm-like mini robot, about the size of a maggot. You simply place it in your outer ear, and it crawls down into your ear canal, where it embeds itself into a blood vessel near the eardrum, thus ensuring its energy supply. Unaffected by background noise, the earworm transmits all acoustic signals from and to the internet. If you tug four times on your earlobe, the earworm undocks itself and crawls back into the outer ear. An earworm you just can’t get out of your head is a matter for the doctor to attend to. Or an IT technician. Most people, however, see no reason to undock, and live with the earworm night and day.