5 ideas
In the title story a hunter has just shot an arrow at a leaping lion, and both hang in mid-air. Instead of waiting for the outcome, he reasons through that single instant (t0) against the seconds before it and the possible seconds after it (t1, t2, t3), trying to stay inside the frozen moment. The episode serves as a test case for treating time as a series of discrete, analyzable states rather than a continuous flow.
In Calvino's retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, Abbé Faria digs tunnel after tunnel and keeps striking walls, while Dantès instead reasons about the fortress as a mental structure. His method is to picture a prison with no possible exit and then find the point where that ideal fails to match the real one. That gap is the only true way out.
In 'The Chase' a man stuck in gridlocked traffic is being hunted by a killer in a car behind him. He comes to see that both of them are only elements of the traffic system, and that the system, more than their intentions, fixes their positions and speeds. The roles of hunter and hunted turn out to depend on one's place in a network, not on a fixed relation between two people.
In 'The Night Driver' a man speeds along a highway at night toward his estranged lover, and every car appears only as a pair of headlights. He reasons that he, the woman and a possible rival cannot tell one another apart on the road, so each exists only as a signal.
In the 'Priscilla' sequence, Qfwfq tells cell division and meiosis as a love story. A single-celled being's longing for something outside itself builds up until it can only be expressed by splitting, so the self that loved no longer exists afterward. On this account the drive to connect is the same process that dissolves individual identity and passes it on.