NOT AS SCI-FI AS IT SOUNDS

Scientists are working toward a future like Maurice’s. Here’s the real-life inspo

THIS STORY takes place 50 years in the future, but it was inspired by the direction of today’s technology and scientific discoveries.

Maurice’s skullbuds don’t exist right now, but University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist Charles Limb is working on a technology that might one day evolve into them. He specializes in cochlear implants (CIs), electronic devices that restore hearing by connecting a skull-mounted microphone to tiny electrodes in our inner ear’s cochlea.

As a musician, though, there’s one thing that frustrates him. Most people with CIs don’t like to listen to music — it sounds wrong to them. That’s because CIs today come with only around 20 electrodes, and each connects to a single nerve cell in the cochlea. The problem is that our cochlea have roughly 15,000 of these cells, each dedicated to tuning particular frequencies. The CI has to translate what we’d normally hear with 15,000 tuners into something we hear with only 20. Plus, it’s hard for surgeons to reach the neurons that hear the lowest frequencies because they’re in the deepest part of the inner ear. There go your low notes. But Limb believes that one day we’ll have CIs with many more electrodes that will create a better experience of pitch.

The skullbuds in this story are speculative, but the workplace surveillance Maurice experiences is completely real. Many companies watch what employees are doing in email and texts, and control what they see online. Plus, hackers have been taking control of medical devices like pacemakers and infusion pumps for years. In 2016, a student hacked cochlear implants to improve their performance. Extrapolating these hacks into the future, you’ve got all the tools to hijack Maurice’s skullbuds and force them to play low-fi.

As for the blue whale concerts? I learned about them from Megan McKenna, an acoustic ecologist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado. She works with hydrophones, or mics that work underwater, for recording whale songs, and is a particular expert on blue whales. Blue whales love to gather at the edges of the Monterey Bay canyon to feast on krill and sing. When I ask what she thinks it would be like to attach a hydrophone to her ear and listen to whale song, McKenna’s eyes light up. “It would totally change your perception of space, if you could hear that low frequency,” she says. “You’d hear all of Monterey Bay in one moment: whales, fish, boats 20 miles away.” She smiles. “Our concept of space would blow up.”

When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.