Fiction from "Nature" magazine, February 2012 issues

Four stories, all flash fiction length, all online. I liked one - Moffett's. List below is in order of my preference, best first.

1. 16 February: Mark W Moffett's "Picnic with ants" (A); download: Funny diary of a field worker's observations of an ants colony...
   Added to my "best of 2012" list.
2. 2 February: Ronald D Ferguson's "Words and music" (B); download: Serious consequences of a very minor misunderstanding with an alien, an alien whose ideas about language & casualty are a bit different from us...
3. 9 February: Patricia Fronek's "The interruption" (C); download: Chaos reins at an airport when some sort of a central computer fails for a few hours. I missed the punchline - someone made a lot of money from the event, probably by hacking a bank or something.
4. 23 February: Grace Tang's "Ghost in the machine" (C); download: A dead soldiers braindump is preserved by his wife in a gadget, a gadget with eyes & ears but without a speech organ! Then there is a sex scene of wife having sex in front of the gadget containing husband's consciousness.

Related: Stories from Nature.