The web's first magazine devoted to stories about life in giant artificial structures created by forces beyond human comprehension

Arrows, Co-Arrows

by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

The sky was a perfect infinite line.

Above and below lay the twisted city, and inside the city Trander and his decrepit ant-colony. Let it rot. He needed out like a circle needs a circumference, like a word needs an alphabet. He had attempted escape half a dozen times—but in a fumbling, tentative way, always undermined by self-doubt. Each attempt was an arrow that slipped into the night. His arrows had landed nowhere or, what was the same, had been returned to him, as though un-flung. Time for a new strategy.

He sat in his apartment looking at the intricate tunnels and the winding passages of the colony. On his desk were:


He turned away from the desk and his back cracked, headache blistering. The guttering light from outside was a scimitar that cut through his time, slicing it into a before today and an after today with the sweep of its blade.

The clangs from the meandering street below spilled into his ears like falls of metal instead of water, drowning out his own thoughts. His books lay scattered on the floor. The heavy afternoon continued to poke, with its cascade of weary light and air, at the ribs of his apartment, prodding him to action. Closing his eyes, ignoring the sting of his armpits, he could just discern the sound of the ants, those still alive, tiny legs scampering against the foul cardboard.

He reached forward and took three of the cards from the disheveled collection. He gazed at them intently for a long time.

Trander followed the indications on the cards like a somnambulist under the siren-song of sleep. Halfway through re-filling the artificial food pockets he noticed there weren’t enough bags left. Very well. Tonight would be different.


The rusted key-chain snuggled in his pocket next to his apartment card, he trudged down the street. He greeted several people on his way to the market, fellow inhabitants of this apartment hive.

For a moment he stopped, thinking he had nodded to the same man twice.

He passed the usual venues, all closed at this hour of the night, and before he reached his destination he made a detour and bought himself a little friendship.

This is Ebaneej, the mechanical voice told him: a good friend to over three hundred people in this hive alone. You can discuss anything you want with me. I’ll keep all your secrets-- unless you want them spilled. Now, my friend--

Trander felt no better after this parody of a confession. Tension gripped him like a vise. Could Ebaneej ever understand the problems he faced with the colony? Could he grasp the significance of the ants becoming unresponsive to the signal? No frequency reaction, no food. No future. What about Elissa? This dumb mechanical friend left him feeling emptier than before.

Trander reached into his pocket and for the hundredth time his fingers acted out their tick, sliding across the cold key-chain.

Once he had purchased the food, he walked in the direction opposite to home … and arrived home. Here’s how it happened:

 He had tried walking away times before, and convinced himself he had simply lacked perseverance. It was possible his street was a circular one, a loop, after all. But not all parallel streets could be loops that would take him back to his own. So, tonight, he turned onto a perpendicular street every few blocks, and then onto a parallel.

He stopped again at the booth of another mechanical friend. He should have heeded his lesson from before; again, it left him just as unfeeling.

 More night air, more night streets. He memorized their names. He traced out the direction of his travel in a mental map. Turn left here. Two blocks down this one. Now another left. Three walks—-can’t cross, keep going. The shadows cast by the omnipresent grey apartment hives made it hard, at times, to see where he was. He waited, always, to see the markings on the dim signs before crossing again.

On and on for hours. Hunger and exhaustion beseeched his body to stop, to seek out shelter, food, a sign of the familiar. But he pushed on, because that was the problem: it was all familiar, a conspiracy of sameness in the narrow streets and leaden building faces, endless similitude in the pungent smells from lobbies and unsavory street-vendors, everything and everyone blurring into one another.

At last a cause for hope: dawn. But morning light could hardly penetrate the swath of clouds, and the famished beams of smoke-tinged glow reminded him only of his own anemic state.

The headache pounded.

Trander spat, but he refused to give in.

March on, march on.

And then, under a lift in the cloud cover, he realized he was standing on his own street, right before his building.


This is Trander, a mechanical voice said. Loyal giver to this twisted city for the last two years, caring partner to a woman who requires only, like a plant, to be--

He woke up, temples throbbing.

Phone was chiming.

“Hi Elissa,” he said.

“We need to talk,” Elissa said, her voice a steel wire  scraping against the hood of an old car. The dented upper-left hand corner of the screen screwed up pixels on her right cheekbone, but the wire continued along the car-hood undeterred. “They think it’s metastasized,” she said.


He brought her several bags but she wasn’t hungry. She dismissed them, and they slid towards the corners of the crumpled bed sheets, to rest in the folds and cloth shadows like clouds of ash in a pleated sky.

He said, “How are you feeling, sweetie?”

She stared down at her hands. “I’m not sure,” she said. “You live with it so long, you almost begin to think it’s a part of you. I mean, how couldn’t you?”

Trander nodded. Empty gift boxes, all of them, every excursion into hope. The therapies were wrapping; the optimistic prognoses ribbons. Empty gift boxes, all of them.

He reached into his wallet and withdrew the datafoil that contained a picture album of Elissa taken before she had been interned. They looked at these images like they might look at someone else’s life. Elissa had arrived at the city only five months after Trander, but he’d known from the first time he saw her that they had something in common. Maybe that was why he was here. And maybe that was why he needed to escape.

The photographs of the past revealed strange truths about the Elissa of the present. She was a creature transformed, angular, oblique. They marveled at the glimpse of an exposed shoulder from when her shoulders had been more than bone, a snapshot of lips parted in an alluring kiss from when her lips had been full enough to kiss, an unexpected dimple from a time when she was still able to experience surprise—all graces that were no more.

“I’m going to stay with you tonight, Elissa,” Trander said. His headache always got worse in the clinic. But tonight he could laugh at that.

She held a finger up to his forehead, cool against the moisture of his pallid skin.

“I’d like that,” she said.

He reached down and extracted a camera from his bag. He injected the datafoil.

He expected no consent or reaction.

He would, once again, record the moments, and she would  pose for him, draped in pain.

Just like old times.


Trander fell asleep on the subway ride back to his apartment the next afternoon. He missed his stop … and then found it again. Here’s how it happened:

He woke to find himself clutching the torus key-chain and the apartment card. He struggled into an upright position, fingers clutching at the edge of his seat, and he breathed out a long lilting sigh, an exhalation consumed by the almost sexual rumble of the subway.

He rose and looked at the name of the next stop. He blinked a few times and yawned: he couldn’t recognize it. Two men sitting in front of him dozed; a woman on the opposite side of the compartment, long legs folded, played with her hair, her sideways gaze lost in the blur of the tunnels rushing past them. He approached her and asked. She said, “That’s my stop. That’s where I live.”

“What’s it called?”

“It’s my home,” she said.

“Ok. Great. Thank you,” he said.

He retreated back to his seat and waited. Underway again, he consulted the screen for the next one: another unfamiliar name. No use asking. The woman had departed and he didn’t wish to wake up either of the stodgy sleepers.

Ten stops later, the very same woman boarded. He sought out her eyes but she didn’t acknowledge him.

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen stops later, he began to recognize the names. And soon his own was on display and then upon him.

A circular line, he thought.

On the way up into the world he dropped his bag, and as he stooped to retrieve it he noticed that his datafoil with the new pictures of Elissa was missing.

He turned back on the electric escalator and thought he saw one of the men on the subway retrieving his datafoil—and was that the same man he’d greeted on his way to the store?

Repeat visions everywhere, echoes of experience. He scurried towards safety. Home at last, he fumbled with his card for a few moments, then finally heard the soft sounds of the ant-colony as he opened the door to his apartment, key-chain secure against his breast in the pocket of his jacket.


He studied the ant-colony with the determination of one who must start a fire in the midst of the wilderness or freeze to death. Despite his religious tending, it had fallen into a state of terminal disrepair, and he could not discern why. The ants seemed to be suffering from a contagion. Many had simply stopped dead in their tracks. Some seemed to have disappeared altogether. They had also ceased to respond to the signals, the signals that told them where to go so he could clean compartments, where to locate the plentiful food.

He had sought new cards. Perhaps, he thought, the instructions had become obsolete. Perhaps the colony had transitioned into a new population phase, and the old dynamics were no longer applicable.

But the cards had been laid out for him to find when he first awoke in this apartment two years ago, and there were none for sale at any store.

His pattern of thinking circled back on itself, from not caring to caring back to not caring: Fine. Damn the colony. Let it crumble.

The pain in his head was splitting.

Trander’s eyes burned with the effort of perception.

His breath quickened.

He started to dial Elissa’s hospital room, but stopped when he realized it was her sleeping time.

Instead, he dialed the hospital’s general directory. After the correct routing, a pasty-faced administrator appeared on the screen. Even the dent wasn’t enough to lighten his dour, lifeless expression.

“I want to check myself in,” Trander said.

“I understand, sir. What’s your condition?”

“Migraine,” he said.

The admin raised an eyebrow. It was a fraction of an inch, but it was enough to make Trander cringe.

“Very well,” the admin said, trying to recover with forced professionalism. “Transmit your inscription data to the following short-code. Select the premium package option and we’ll have a room ready for you within the hour.”

“Fine,” Trander said. He completed the transaction through datafoil instants later, packed a few items--key-chain, camera--and headed out.

It was colder than usual. A film of gelidity seemed to adhere to all surfaces, even to the air. He hunched his head in his garment and stepped up the pace.

As he approached the subway entrance his gaze wandered toward the perpetual, perfect sky, the endless line that stretched above and below.

He paused a moment. The headache urged him to move on. But he felt sick and drained from always responding to the same triggers, over and over and over.

And so he paused.

And then--a memory fell into place, as snug as a clump of food in one of the colony’s slots. He had seen a different sky, once. The real one. It should not be like this. It should extend over the horizon. Only above.

The insight caused something to detonate within his mind. Every photograph he’d ever taken of Elissa flashed through his mind’s eye, a confabulation of movement, emotion, simulated depth. Why had he been drawn to her?

Passersby bumped into him, practically tugging at him to continue his journey to the subway, to the hospital, to surrender and defeat. He stood his ground.

He had been drawn to her by--

Pain. Pain, in every picture. A grimace, a smile, it made no difference.

Her pain? A reflection of his own.

Her breast cancer? His malignancy.

And now, for the first time, the reversal clicked, and he grasped how to set her free at last: his own freedom, through relinquishment of pain, would be her liberation.

Faces floated before him from his previous life, beckoning.

There had been endless possibilities back then, for joy--and for suffering. His real wife’s cancer, the passing of his brother and mother …

But instead of healing his pain, he had tied it into a knot, a tangle coiled so tightly that it had transposed him to this Möbius band of a city, to this geometry symptomatic of his grief. It all made sense now. The headache was the transmission of the signal. The mechanical friends did nothing but track his movements, remind him of his loneliness. The duplicated characters—distance had no meaning, personality no room in which to move. And the more he held on to his pain, the deeper he became mired in this construct.

He had sacrificed two years of his life to this city.

No more.

Let go.

There was a clinking of metal on the rain-dampened asphalt—moist from the spray of precipitation that had fallen from above and that had seeped through from below—as Trander dropped his donut-shaped keychain onto the ground and stepped into the infinity of the real.


Alvaro Zinos-Amaro grew up in Europe, mostly, and despite the advice of his betters he was crazy enough to earn a BS in Theoretical Physics and study creative writing. His fiction has appeared in Atomjack Magazine and will appear in a forthcoming issue of Farrago's Wainscot. Alvaro's reviews of speculative fiction and poetry appear regularly at The Fix and a critical review will appear in the first issue of Fruitless Recursion. Visit him at his blog, Waiting for My Aineko.