Line #53 Sandbox/DocFuture


1	The web serial of Doc Future is written by William Dow Rieder and consists of three novel-long stories: ''The Fall of Doc Future'' (completed), ''Skybreaker's Call'' (completed), and ''The Maker's Ark''. The main protagonists are two professional superheroes — Doc Future, whose mental augmentations had essentially made him into the smartest human in the world, and his adoptive daughter Flicker, whose unique and very powerful speedster abilities likewise make her into the ''fastest'' human in the world. With the help of their friends, they try to keep the world safe from super villains, natural catastrophes, demons, gods, wizards, alien invasions, and themselves.
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3	In ''The Fall'', Doc Future's mind is starting to fail him, endangering the world because of all the superheroes who depend on his work. The exquisite mind he had been cultivating since his youth is slowly deteriorating, and it is killing him. The reason for this is his sleep deprivation, caused by an endless barrage of prophetic nightmares which have been targeting him since his teenage years. Doc’s private and suspicious nature, unfortunately, hinder him from even telling his friends and daughter about it. Flicker, more than smart enough to read between the lines, desperately reaches out for help to Dr. Stella Reinhart — an academic whose research and articles pinpoint her as one of the best mind control and mind augmentation specialists currently alive. %%I recommend removing the plot from this point on since it will mostly only be spoiling the story%% It turns out that the plot against Doc runs much deeper, touches the pantheons of Nordic mythology, Doc's former lover, the mysterious origin of Flicker and her powers, and the actions of himself in futures that will never come to pass. He falls into a deep coma, and it is up to Flicker and Stella to save him.
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5	%%In ''The Call'', Flicker must rise to her birthright when the repercussions of inter-dimensional skirmishes in ''The Fall'' once more exposes Earth to the interests of aliens. The first visitors happen to be old friends of Doc's, and come with glad tidings of a system of market economics that has the potential to solve every problem of poverty and scarcity. The second visitors have a holy crusade to execute, a fleet of unimpregnable warships, and the only one who can stop their planet-spanning siege and save the world's farm animals and pets from extinction, is Flicker.
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7	%%In ''The Ark'', Doc unveils his plans to carry humanity into a safe future by a roundabout scheme of changing fate itself. His life's work, an AI who is more dear to him than the woman he loves, creates an avenging angel who descends upon the international corporation conglomerates with the fury of the heavens in order to free the world from the danger of AI-aided corporate finance decision making, and bring about an era of plenty and financial freedom for all. At the same time, in the strange corners of the multiverse, unknown entities stir, and it seems Flicker is not the only one who can circumnavigate the Earth in a microsecond.
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9	The tumblr on which the trilogy is currently being published is [[http://docfuture.tumblr.com/ here.]]
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11	The first two books can be navigated through their Table of contents: ''[[http://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/82363551272/fall-of-doc-future-contents The Fall,]]'' ''[[http://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/111819789111/skybreakers-call-contents The Call.]]''
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13	Prologue of ''The Ark'' is [[http://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/116360879621/the-makers-ark-prologue here]] (no table of contents yet).
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17	!! The series as a whole provides examples of:
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19	* AlternateTimeline: So many of them, in fact, that their influence on the “current” iteration starts messing with the laws of nature and creates phenomena that people generally label as magic.
20	%%* ArtificialIntelligence
21	* AuthorAppeal: There are a ''lot'' of casual sexual relationships with strong, dominant women involved. Many of them are polyamorous, which mostly passes without comment.
22	* BodySurf: Useful for making your enemies kill each other, among other things.
23	* BrownNote: Several variations: the nature of Dendrite’s abilities makes anyone connected to her mind be overwhelmed by her mind’s automatic defences and die almost instantly; the nature of this world’s TimeTravel makes even thinking about certain things hazardous for the individual; etc.
24	%%* CloneByConversion: Among Dendrite’s abilities.
25	%%* DemonicPossession
26	%%* {{Deprogram}}: Among Donner’s abilities.
27	* DimensionLord: Power over many pocket dimensions belongs to specific mythological creatures.
28	* DoubleStandardRapeFemaleOnMale: Doc was in university at age 15, and several women who were explicitly a few years older flirted with him. He rejected them all, but not a single person in story seems to be concerned with the fact that women who were legal adults were interested in a teenager who wasn't old enough to drive a car. Compare and contrast to Flicker's sexual experience with Donner, where a lot of emphasis is placed on her relative youth. [[spoiler:Yiskah does end up having sex with Doc's memory of being 15, and the real Doc implicitly lost his virginity at 17, which is legal in some states. One could argue that he's mature and intelligent enough to deal at 15...but when he had a breakup he built and almost ''used'' a world-destroying doomsday device as an elaborate form of suicide.]]
29	%%* DreamWeaver: Yiskah.
30	%%* EmotionSuppression: Flicker almost gets burned by this.
31	* EntropyAndChaosMagic: Mass-scale probability manipulation of several types.
32	* {{Expy}}: V-man (Superman), Blue Sentinel (Green Lantern), etc.
33	* FakeMemories: Existence of [[MindManipulation mind manipulators]] of various flavours doesn’t help Doc’s paranoia much. Generally, most of the high-tier superheroes have their own ways of detecting if their mind and memories have been messed with.
34	* FlowersForAlgernonSyndrome: Doc’s prolonged sleep deprivation makes his mental augmentations gradually fail, which affects his intellectual capabilities. [[spoiler: After his augmentation platform gets destroyed, he even loses some of his edge in quick-thinking and reaction, which becomes especially noticeable to him during his interactions with Flicker.]]
35	%%* TheHecateSisters
36	* HijackingCthulhu: Stella's ability allows her to hijack pretty much anything (e.g. a MonsterOfTheWeek-godzilla or a high-tier demon from pocket dimension) if its nervous network is in position of direct physical contact with her.
37	* HiveMind: Dendrite’s ability allows this, with certain reservations.
38	* HumansAreInsects: [[spoiler: Skybreaker]] wouldn’t care less about humans if they weren’t polluting a world in her care that she was supposed to be keeping clean from parasitic infections like them.
39	* HypnoRay: One supervillain’s mass-scale mind control device was what caused [[spoiler: Dendrite to become what they are]].
40	* ImmuneToMindControl: Stella. When developing her own mental augmentations, she focused on protecting herself, rather than pure thinking speed, to the point where anything that makes an attempt to read her mind gets ''eaten'' and replaced with another copy of herself.
41	%%* JourneyToTheCenterOfTheMind: To some extent.
42	%%* ManipulativeBastard: Wanderer.
43	* MentalTimeTravel: Doc’s future selves, from branches of timeline in which the world met its end [[ApocalypseHow in various ways]], send him cautionary visions to help him avoid the mistakes they’ve made and save the planet with its inhabitants.
44	%%* MindManipulation
45	%%* MindControlDevice
46	* MindVirus: In certain situations Dendrite is able to convert other people’s minds into dormant copies of her own.
47	* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: ''She Who Waits, Eater of Demons.'' Also ''Skybreaker'' and ''Eyetaker'' qualify when you realize just how literal those epithets are.
48	%%* Myth/NorseMythology
49	* PocketDimension: Earth of the characters’ timeline has an abnormal quantity of such dimensions attached to it.
50	* {{Polyamory}}: [[spoiler: Both Doc and Flicker]] eventually end up in polyamorous relations, for different reasons.
51	* ResetButton: Doc’s ability to send warnings to his past self had allowed him for rather many iterations to reset bad outcomes, so to speak, and try to keep the world stable in yet another try.
52	%%* SaveScumming: Doc, to some extent. [[spoiler: Wanderer]].
53	* ScrewYourself: [[spoiler: In a SexyDiscretionShot, Stella and Yiskah, who are more or less the same person, sleep with Doc.]]
54	* StableTimeLoop: There’s an interesting variation of this trope here: information is being sent back in time from multiple agents and from multiple alternative timelines, and what the characters experience as their world is the stabilised environment after all this information settled into a stable new outcome.
55	* StoryBreakerPower: Protagonists’ abilities are so powerful in many ways that in many other stories it would’ve been difficult to preserve the conflict. Here, however, the author manages to keep it interesting by carefully choosing what types of problems the protagonists will be solving (usually [[ApocalypseHow Class 2]] Apocalypse scenarios and higher), ''how'' they will be solving them (e.g. Flicker is discouraged from toppling governments known for humans rights abuse because in the larger scale of things it would only destabilise the world and make things worse), and what limiting factors are attached to those powerful abilities (e.g. Flicker could, in theory, travel at speed of light, but doing so would cause severe damage to the planet).
56	* SuperIntelligence: Achievable through mind augmentations, genetic modifications of embryos, technological augmentation and ascension, etc.
57	** Doc and Stella both underwent intensive processes of modifying their own minds.
58	** Flicker is not superhumanly intelligent (though she's well above average), but she can speed up her mind to get a ''lot'' of thinking done in a very short linear time.
59	* SuperSpeed: Flicker can accelerate herself to just about anything short of light-speed, with her mind and her perceptions going correspondingly faster, although that can have powerful side effects.
60	--> She usually just shrugged and gave her standard answer of '80% of the speed of light' rather than the truthful one of 'Very close to the speed of light, but I don't know exactly how close, and I did a scary amount of damage to the Moon last time I tried to find out.'
61	%%* {{Telepathy}}

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