I was in an exotic market, full of the sights, scents and cacophony of an alternate reality.

I watched as a young woman paid for a handful of fruits that looked like miniature lichee-nuts, but  were a luminous yellow. Her forehead was long, she had no hair, and over a dozen earrings hung from each of her earlobes (which drooped several centimeters below her jawline). To pay for the fruit, she pulled one of the earrings out and handed it to the merchant: the earring was of a curiously, elegant design, bent at improbable angels.

The merchant pulled a brick shaped stone from the shelves of his kiosk and struck the earring on the stone, thereby producing harmonic tones; apparently, the value of the earring-coin was determined by the quality of the resonance…