ZÜRICH. The broadcaster SFR—correction, SRF—assembled three hearing specialists, Rainer H. Porschien, Georgios Somakos and Alex Vils, to answer citizen questions about tinnitus in the chat column of its consumer programme "Puls". The condition is well documented among the species: after decades of exposure to sounds that existed, the ear begins producing one that does not. The prescribed remedy is a small device that amplifies the surrounding world until the invented sound recedes. The locals thus purchase loudness at twenty-five and its cancellation at fifty-five, and no one at either counter mentions the other transaction.
The mechanism rewards study. Inside the ear, delicate cells wear down under mechanical load; the brain, receiving fewer signals, compensates by broadcasting a tone of its own manufacture. The instrument restores outside volume, and the interior broadcast fades into the crowd. Nothing is repaired. The defect is simply outbid.
The consultation itself is free, a courtesy this desk found suspicious until the financing confessed: the instrument, retailing between 1,900 and 5,400 francs per ear, is partly covered by mandatory insurance and partly financed through a human "bank", an institution licensed to store numbers, which charges rent on the difference. "A young customer buys decibels from us on a Friday," one certified acoustician explained patiently. "Thirty years later he returns to buy the opposite. We call this customer retention." Asked whether prevention might spare the patient both transactions, a second specialist noted that the ear keeps no receipts.
The resulting bill, itemised for the home office: concert admission, one unit, paid by the local; thirty years of machinery, traffic and headphone output, paid by the ear; expert chat, one unit, complimentary; instrument restoring the exterior, half reimbursed, remainder invoiced to the local; the whole arrangement filed, without irony, under "quality of life". On our world, weather went unrecorded until we began invoicing for it. Here the ear has kept the accounts silently for centuries, and the species believed it.
The ledger, as usual, balances. The ringing appears on no line item, being neither bought nor sold: the one sound on Terra that costs nothing, and the only one the customer cannot stop purchasing.
