“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 1966

“A managed democracy is a wonderful thing... for the managers... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible'.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 1966

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.

Two paths diverged in the woods, and I
I took the fork less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.

-- Robert Frost

Sovereign Sky - Excerpt 7 - A New Hope

Doc: Hey Marty, want to fork a few billion new parallel universes with me today?

Marty: Uh, sure, Doc, can we be finished by lunch? I had plans for this afternoon...

Doc: No problem, Marty, it'll take just ten minutes to explain it to you and then we just have to sit back and let our All Knowing Author post it. The mere act of mentioning this publicly will fork every dystopian universe out there with a parallel one in which freedom has hope!

Marty: What exactly did you have in mind, Doc?

Doc: Well, as I mentioned back in Episode 5, the multiverse has gone dark. All parallel universes we can scan have dystopian factors clear off the Browniean scale - well beyond mere 1984 norms. That means the Beast in all reachable universes has finished building its cage for humanity and has started slamming the doors shut. We are now operating on the same rate of change as we saw in the 1929 to 1941 time frame. A crisis of epic proportions has begin and only intervention on the scale of D-Day has a chance of rolling it back.

Marty: I thought you said we could finish this by lunch, Doc...

Doc: Don't worry, Marty, I've already done all the simulations and back of the envelope calculations, this has a well over 17% chance of working in at least one of the parallel universes we're going to fork.

Marty: Oh, well then...

Doc: Anyhow, Marty, while a single polar sun-synchronous satellite is a great proof of concept, what I really have in mind is a constellation of 8 such satellites in equatorial orbit. That's enough to give everybody in the tropics, plus or minus 22.5 degrees north and south of the equator between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, continuous access to a ring of satellites spaced out around that orbit. Each satellite can have four block signing nodes for a total of 32 nodes running a full-up Brown EOS network. That's enough to handle all the world's financial transactions without using a single piece of infrastructure from the existing Dystopian financial system. People anywhere in the tropics get their own Sovereign Financial Beltway, I call it the Silk Skyway!

Marty: I get the Skyway part Doc, what's that got to do with silk?

Doc Well, "Silk" refers to the ancient Silk Road that ran from Rome to Korea across Asia in the days of Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn. Its famous as a symbol for what improved connectivity can do for the economies it connected all along the route. Well, in most of the universes we care about, China has revived the idea with their One Belt One Road initiative. Building new roads, ports, pipelines, and other infrastructure. The goal is to boost the economies of Asia and Europe the same way the old Silk Road did, but on a much larger scale.

Marty How do you know stuff like this, Doc?

Doc It's a gift Marty, now listen carefully. What China wants to do for Asia, we can do for the entire third world! Our "Silk Skyway" reaches all the poorest regions of the world without interfering with the occupied territory of the Dystopian Powers. There is far less resistance to blockchain FINTECH in this part of the world and we can actually demonstrate what it can do in the most dramatic way possible. While the Dystopians are choking the life out of the Great Northern Powers, we can be growing a replacement system in international space and beam it straight down into the tropics!

Marty: Pretty cool Doc. I know this is a science fiction short story and all, but this sounds pretty far fetched. What makes you so sure that any one in all the forking universes will be able to pull this off?

Doc: It's easier than you might think, Marty. The private space launch industry has come of age. We could put the whole constellation up there with a single Space X Falcon rocket. They've got payload launchers that can spray small satellites into orbit from a single launch. This is probably why the Dystopian Forces have been attacking Elon Musk lately. They sense that free access to space could be a hole in the cage they are building for humanity.

Marty Wow! That's really cool, Doc! To bad this is only science fiction!

Doc: Well, the thing is Marty, science fiction has a way of turning into reality faster and faster these days. As soon as this gets published, it'll start happening in hundreds or millions of parallel universes out there. We've just planted the seed.

Marty: You're the Doc, Doc!