End Four: RotaxanIntox

By Boris D. Schleinkofer

Beware—you might get what you thought you wanted.
Elena's a faceless 20-something trying their best to survive in a hostile environment full of predators.
They'll find out the environment itself is trying to survive them.
When nothing is certain and it looks most like all hope is lost...
That's the time to strike.
From smallest to largest, lowest to highest, least to greatest—the weapon now assembles itself from within.
These are the ends of the world; we are at them, they are at our throats.
Whether or not we choose to shout ourselves awake from these nightmares is up to us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Boris D. Schleinkofer
• Release date: Sep 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463922682

Boris D. Schleinkofer

He is a fictional character in the Horror-Play “The Greatest Practical Joke Ever”, by Shaytan Komp’ü’tor. He has never made love to a beautiful woman, never wallowed in fresh kill, never found a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. In fact, he doesn't even exist at all. So there...And another:Boris D. Schleinkofer is a slave, just like you and everybody else. He lives near the monolith of Baal. His number is 5x2-00x1-11. He is a good citizen.

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End Four:

ROTAXANINTOX

(Series: @TheEndsOfTheWorld)

©2018 Boris D. Schleinkofer

Cover image and author photo created by Boris D. Schleinkofer

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 9780463922682

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Part One: Seed

Part Two: Web

Part Three: Wash

APPENDIX: Overshare

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Shaped Electrical Fields

Figure 2: Biological & Technological Scales Compared

Figure 3: Electrostatic Nanoparticle Assembly

Figure 4: Giant Skeleton, Ohio

Figure 5: Protein Crystals

Figure 6: Carbon Nanotube Assembly

Figure 7: Hiveship (Cross-Section)

Figure 8: LAM

Figure 9: Plasmonic Metamaterials

Figure 10: Rotaxane

Figure 11: Biomimetic Scaffold Fabrication

Figure 12: Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis Infestation Of Camponotus Pennsylvanicus

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Text appearing in italics, except where it has been used to indicate emotive emphasis, consists of searchable phrases leading to other texts supporting the underlying assertions.

Pay! A! –tenshun!

TL,DR: This stuff is real, go look it up for yourself. I've made it easier for you.

One more time, for those in the back taking selfies:

Dis! Shyt! Iz! Reel!

Figure 1: Shaped Electrical Fields

The nanos that are being found have an ominous quality about them. When touched with a pin the object began to glow. The center is a hexagonal crystal and the dark jagged plate is reminiscent of something out of an evil tale. The pouch with the V at the bottom is highly fluorescent and multicolored. ... These are not made by Mother Nature. It is terrifying to know they are in your body.

Internet-user Smith, J.; 'Living With A Nightmare', published to http://www.doctorkoontz.com (2007)

"Edward picked it up, cradled it for a while, and found that it seemed to fit his arm and shoulder very snugly.

You're mine.

And that, more or less, was the end of Edward d'Eath. Something continued for a while, but what it was, and how it thought, wasn't entirely human."

Pratchett, T.; Men at Arms

Figure 2: Biological & Technological Scales Compared

I'd be lying if I said

I didn't dream sometimes

About what it would be like

If I didn't have this life

Teen Suicide – I Am My Own Hell

Part One: Seed

Even if you figure out the 'how' and the 'why' of something that went wrong in the past, that big catastrophic life-changing something that leaves you a little bit less or even a lot less of the person you were than when you started, even if you get that all put together nicely in your head and you finally understand it and how it was all supposed to happen...

Maybe even knowing all this won't make you feel any better about it in the present.

I know this, now. I'll never be able to un-know it. I'll never be free from it.

I know I'm going to carry this forever.

This is a story about how I lost my whole world, but it's also a story about how we all lost our whole world, or rather how we gained the other. Someone gained something, somewhere, I hope. I sure do hope someone got something out of this. I can't help but to think this. Part of me wishes I could, part of me wishes I was still able to resist, but really I know better than all that.

I don't want to think about that.

My name is Elena, and I'm one of the hated 'Gen-Z' inscrutables that everybody likes to complain about, when they bother to admit that we exist at all. I can't help that I was born like this. No matter how you look at it, it seems like I was always supposed to turn out this way.

I don't like to talk about myself but one of the things I've learned from Miss Pettigrew my English teacher is that the teller of the story is an integral part of the story, forming the lens through which we view history, so I guess I'll have to. I suppose a physical description would help, no matter if I have to resist the urge to puke to give it. I hate my body. It's all the wrong shapes in all the wrong places; I swear I'm built like a cone and I can't stand it but there it is and there's nothing I can do about it. I mean, cones are okay, I guess, but come on... My butt and my thighs are too big and my boobs are too small, my face is too small inside my lumpy head and my eyes are too close together. I'm not in any way what other people would describe as 'pretty' and I know it, you don't have to rub it in. I like to think that I make up for it with my zany sense of style.

I'm twenty-nine years old and I live in a small city just north of Las Madres, kind of in its shadow I suppose you could say, you've probably never heard of it unless you're an English major like me. It's known for its campus but not much else. There was never anything much to do here besides drink, if you were the kind of person who was into that.

And going to shows, but I was usually too busy studying to stay out that late.

I wanted to be a writer, but I thought I was being realistic about it and knew that I would have to support myself while I was waited for my big break. I assumed I was going to get a teaching degree or, if things went for the worse, to fall back on my minor and go into computer programming. I liked to think I had a good plan for how I would get a hold on life, how I was supposed to make it in the world when so many of my peers were falling deeper and deeper into debt with student loans and finding their degrees useless and their alcoholism becoming a serious problem. I thought I'd been careful.

It seemed like you couldn't have ever been too careful, back then. Everything was dangerous and scary. There were shootings every other day it seemed like and no one doing anything about all the guns. All my friendships were fading away. Everybody was going crazy from having to deal with the racism and the homophobia and the violence and the oppression and the terrorism and how it had all gone on for as long as any of us had known. The world was ready for a change, and we really thought we knew what we wanted. We wanted an end to the pain.

It was systemic. It made a person nervous all the time, itchy under the skin in a place you couldn't reach; it made you feel like you were stuck in the past or playing out dread-laden fears of what you supposed would be your future, but you were never really fully present in the Now.

The food we ate was killing us, the water was all poisoned, the air we breathed induced anxiety, everyone was stuck in their little boxes and everything was toxic and it was so much easier a lot of the time to just....

...fade out...

EXT/INT – THE FIRMAMENT BEFORE CREATION – NIGHT/DAY

(FADE IN on to a patternless void; regular movements arise in the constant micro-motion and form up in standing waves, weaving a matrix of hollow pockets between the stillness. In a paradoxical twist, a ZOOM IN closer upon an area of the void causes the empty spaces to become smaller, more tightly-packed, the lattice-work of connective tissues solidifying around the area to form an elementary particle. The more we reach for it, the further away it recedes. This particle has not yet to assume any physical mass, and a vision of its journey through time reveals it to take a shape and then cast that shape away again, only to take on another form of a lesser or higher degree of coherence, and so on and so forth from the