By Richard A. Lovett (©2006)
This is another piece of flash fiction for Nature, which published it on 2 February 2006).
Courtney Brandt was having a nightmare when the music started. One moment she was floundering in a blizzard — lost, gasping for air that wasn’t there: all the things that most emphatically were not going to happen. The next, she was hearing Pachelbel’s Canon, which for some reason she’d thought right for this, her first climb of a peak higher than Ben Nevis. Silly idea. Pachelbel wasn’t Everest music. Even sillier had been reading a history chip of the days before smart fabrics and solar nets — the type of stuff that makes you think too much about the environment against which your equipment is designed to shield you…
read more in Nature.