"[There are millions of earpiece translators in circulation. They’re a modern commonplace. You speak English, I speak Français as I am doing now, and the machines interpret for us. And if the background noise is low...and our speech is not too infested with jargon or argot...and if not too many people are speaking all at once...and if we are not referring to some context beyond the comprehension of small-scale machine processing...and if we don’t complicate our exchange with too many nonverbal interactions such as human gestures and expressions—well then, we understand one another.]" He gestured broadly. "[That is to say, despite all the odds, we force some modicum of human meaning through this terribly intimate ear-mounted membrane of computation.]"