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.
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.
The tumblr on which the trilogy is currently being published is here.
The first two books can be navigated through their Table of contents: The Fall, The Call.
Prologue of The Ark is here (no table of contents yet).
The series as a whole provides examples of:
- Alternate Timeline: 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.
- Author Appeal: There are a lot of casual sexual relationships with strong, dominant women involved. Many of them are polyamorous, which mostly passes without comment.
- Body Surf: Useful for making your enemies kill each other, among other things.
- Brown Note: 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 Time Travel makes even thinking about certain things hazardous for the individual; etc.
- Dimension Lord: Power over many pocket dimensions belongs to specific mythological creatures.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: 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. 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.
- Entropy and Chaos Magic: Mass-scale probability manipulation of several types.
- Expy: V-man (Superman), Blue Sentinel (Green Lantern), etc.
- Fake Memories: Existence of 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.
- "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: Doc’s prolonged sleep deprivation makes his mental augmentations gradually fail, which affects his intellectual capabilities. 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.
- Hijacking Cthulhu: Stella's ability allows her to hijack pretty much anything (e.g. a Monster of the Week-godzilla or a high-tier demon from pocket dimension) if its nervous network is in position of direct physical contact with her.
- Hive Mind: Dendrite’s ability allows this, with certain reservations.
- Humans Are Insects: 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.
- Hypno Ray: One supervillain’s mass-scale mind control device was what caused Dendrite to become what they are.
- Immune to Mind Control: 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.
- Mental Time Travel: Doc’s future selves, from branches of timeline in which the world met its end in various ways, send him cautionary visions to help him avoid the mistakes they’ve made and save the planet with its inhabitants.
- Mind Virus: In certain situations Dendrite is able to convert other people’s minds into dormant copies of her own.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: She Who Waits, Eater of Demons. Also Skybreaker and Eyetaker qualify when you realize just how literal those epithets are.
- Pocket Dimension: Earth of the characters’ timeline has an abnormal quantity of such dimensions attached to it.
- Polyamory: Both Doc and Flicker eventually end up in polyamorous relations, for different reasons.
- Reset Button: 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.
- Screw Yourself: In a Sexy Discretion Shot, Stella and Yiskah, who are more or less the same person, sleep with Doc.
- Stable Time Loop: 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.
- Story-Breaker Power: 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 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).
- Super-Intelligence: Achievable through mind augmentations, genetic modifications of embryos, technological augmentation and ascension, etc.
- Doc and Stella both underwent intensive processes of modifying their own minds.
- 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.
- Super-Speed: 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.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.'
- The World Is Always Doomed: There are so many bad outcomes for the human civilisation that Doc’s warnings about them from his future selves had essentially become indistinguishable from a stream of never-ending nightmares.
