E.E. "Doc" Smith was widely read by scientists and engineers from the 1930s into the 1970s. Literary precursors of ideas which arguably entered the military-scientific complex include SDI (Triplanetary), stealth (Gray Lensman), the OODA loop, C3-based warfare, and the AWACS (Gray Lensman). An inarguable influence was described in a June 11, 1947, letter to Doc from John W. Campbell (the editor of Astounding, where much of the Lensman series was originally published). In it, Campbell relayed Captain Cal Laning's acknowledgment that he had used Smith's ideas for displaying the battlespace situation (called the "tank" in the stories) in the design of the United States Navy's ships' Combat Information Centers.

---

DISCLAIMER - This draft short story excerpt is a work of Science Fiction designed to communicate insights about the actual "Real World" in which we live. Any similarities to the places, people, and events of that world are either a coincidence or a deliberate attempt to ridicule specific elements of that world that ought to be ashamed of themselves.

---

Excerpt 4 - Doc's Darwin Awards

Doc Brown: Hey Marty, come check this out!

Marty: What's that smell, Doc?

Doc Brown: Don't worry about that, the fire's already out. Look at this!

Marty: Where's the probe, Doc. I thought you said we were gonna test it today?

Doc Brown: We are testing it! The countdown clock failed to hold at T-minus ten-minutes like I planned so it went ahead and launched when I wasn't looking. Went right through the wall over there behind the extinguisher foam, but seems to be working flawlessly...

Marty: Sheesh Doc!

Doc Brown: Look at this! Telemetry's already coming in. We're getting reports from self-forking probes in a couple thousand parallel universes already. Of course, it already forked a few infinities of them but we don't have the bandwidth to listen to them all at once. That's what this universe browser is for. We can tune it to pick out any subset and display a map of the fork structure right here!

Marty: But Doc! That's like the ultimate needle in a haystack. How do we even begin to know what to search for?

Doc Brown: Well, just for fun, I filtered on all the instances where you get hit by a bus in the next five years. That's what these are. But I'm about to switch over to the main search parameters I've been planning. We're not exactly flying blind. Each of these probes is programmed to find and tap into whatever internet may exist in their own timeline. Those that can't find an internet are obviously not in a universe we are looking for so they simply shut down and turn into a toaster.

Marty: Surely you jest!

Doc Brown: No, and don't call me Shirley. Now listen carefully Marty. The probes repeat this process, first seeing if there is a Steemit blockchain and then checking to see if there is a steemit.com/@stan blog named after one of the original founders of BitShares. If they don't find that, they're toasters. If they do, they take over the account and gradually start posting a series of fictional short stories that will only appeal to a certain demographic.

Marty: Like what, Doc?

Doc Brown: Those with ears to hear. These stories will only resonate in the subset of universes where there are freedom-loving innovators seeking for ways to overcome beastly totalitarian governments who tend to follow the writings of that particular Founder. The probes will be able to detect that in the comments and selected forums. If nothing lights up in its particular universe after a few weeks the probe shuts down! That's how we turn gazillion possible universes into a few million possibilities worth collecting telemetry from. They filter themselves out! We wind up with data streams only from universes with people who have ears to hear our message!

Marty: I gotta admit, that is pretty radical, Doc...

Doc Brown: So as soon as we get the attention of all the ears that will hear, we go to phase two and auto-hit them with that document you've been proof reading for me. That lays out a partial vision for what we need each of them to build. Universes with innovators that love to bring SciFi to life are precisely where we can be most influential. The ones that are able to pull off a reasonable facsimile of that vision are the finalists we'll want to examine in detail.

Marty: That document? Oh, you mean Doc's Fictional Guide to the Brown EOS (BEOS)? But you launched before I could finish it, Doc. I'm pretty sure there were some errors in there I wanted to tell you about.

Doc Brown: That's ok, Marty. Each of the universes we are looking for will have people who can figure out how to fix whatever needs fixing and get it working in their own way. That inherent diversity will increase the likelihood that we'll find a universe that develops a solution that can defeat the Beast and win back freedom for humanity. Besides, those errors will attract a certain kind of corrupt deep state terrorists that like to play "gotcha" and put people in prison for life for the hideous crime of having an error or "misleading statement" in their white papers or free speech. We'll definitely want to identify all such universes so we can either steer clear of them or try to cure them of this Orwellian trend in most of the universes that closely match ours.

Marty: So errors in your white paper are actually a good thing?

Doc Brown: That's right Marty. Think of them as Beast bait.

---

Other posts in the Sovereign Sky Series

All My Free Speech is Fiction
Sovereign Sky Excerpt 1 - A Proliferation of Parallels
Sovereign Sky Excerpt 2 - Specialization is for Insects
Sovereign Sky Excerpt 3 - The Fall of Empire
Sovereign Sky Excerpt 4 - Doc's Darwin Awards

Doc's Fictional Guide to the Brown EOS (BEOS)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR