St. Remedius Medical College: "Introducing the Vuun"

An overview of Earth’s first indigenous technologically advanced civilization

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

While modern humans understood by the 1600s CE that they were not the sole sentient lifeform to call Earth home, and weren’t even the only sentient lifeform on Earth at that time, the understanding of those previous species was by necessity based on fragmentary and incomplete remains. With the series of sentients evolving in the Cretaceous Period, most of what was left behind as they eventually abandoned Earth was flattened, crushed, distorted, and metamorphosed by geologic processes, with at least two saurian species leaving no currently recognizable traces in Mesozoic rocks. Most of our knowledge of what is known as “the Cretaceous Conglomerate” came instead thanks to artifacts from outside Earth’s atmosphere, communications sent outside the solar system, and the occasional group found in previously inaccessible quantum pockets or via time corridors to the Human Era. Before that, with one exception, Earth apparently had other things to do than experiment with tool-using intelligence for approximately a half-billion years, and the associated life appreciated the lack of attention. If the Gaia hypothesis had any validity, the assumption was that this was Gaia’s apology for the Vuun, Earth’s first indigenous intelligent species.

Most assuredly, the Vuun were the first. (The various sentients visiting via space or time who set up research facilities, penal colonies, or weapons testing zones before the glaciation of the early Permian Period are the subject of an upcoming essay.) The problematic and idiosyncratic fauna of the Ediacaran Period of the Neoproterozoic Era, some 635 to 538 million years before the present, were predominately filter feeders, with the phylum known as the Trilobozoa producing generally sessile forms that attached themselves to Ediacaran ocean bottoms. One form, though, related to the trilobozoan Tribrachidium heraldicum, managed the transition to motility, to terrestrial existence, and then to sentience. And that’s where the problems began.

To understand the Vuun, understand their emergence from the Neoproterozoic oceans was at a point before eyes, before predation, and before our current levels of oxygen in the atmosphere. The earliest Vuun stood roughly two meters tall, with an internal structure comprised of a lattice of inflatable tissues, much like an air mattress but much more complex. Vuun aquatic ancestors moved by filling portions of that “mattress” with water, eventually evolving limbs using the same process. Some moved laterally, superficially resembling the contemporary echinoderms known as sea pigs, while others sprouted vertically, producing appendages that dragged the main body across the sea floor and later propped the body above the ooze. The surprising development came from forms that were able to use air to give rigidity to their structures and move about on land, with some adapting to feeding on detritus washed ashore instead of filtering it from water. The point where these ancestors developed a neural net to control movement from multiple central locations, as well as developed the limb dexterity to make tools, is unknown: unlike their earlier ancestors, these forms rapidly collapsed at death, leaving little more than a smelly membrane that rapidly broke down and almost never fossilized.

(A typical Vuun: picture a tall grey candelabra made of inner tubes and condoms, with three flanges radiating out from a center shaft. At the top, three boxy bulbs, each with an opening lined with hairs pointing toward the inside, used for trapping food items. Below that, a series of flaps like the gills on an opening mushroom, regularly buzzing and burping. At midpoint, three stubby limbs that extruded and flexed to grasp objects, matching the three that emerged from the widened base. Each limb had three digits, mutually opposable, with the lower digits thicker and stronger to support the body’s weight. At the widened base were a trio of hemispheres also lined with hairs, used for hearing, that opened, closed, and rotated based on the ambient sound in the area.)

The earliest truly sentient Vuun walked across a barren land. Atmospheric oxygen levels were much lower than in the Cambrian, so they augmented their perambulations with regular trips back to the ocean. Other derived trilobozoans stuck to the littoral zone on Ediacaran shores for feeding, breathing, and reproduction, developing structures that produced vibrations that passed through air and stimulated the entire body structure, and the Vuun evolved communication membranes capable of surprising nuance, much like hooking a bellows organ to a series of whoopie cushions. As the Vuun developed writing, that writing more resembled musical scores than the alphabets of later Earth forms, with metaphorical emphasis produced by the sequence and force of the vibrations, with one human expert on the Vuun language describing it as “going from ‘dinner at Taco Bell’ to ‘Monty Python reunion tour.’”

Because of these innovations, the Vuun spread rapidly along the coastlines of the primordial Earth. Fire took time due to a relative lack of oxygen, and of course was impossible in the oceans, but early petroleum deposits soon gave them a regular source of energy for chemistry experiments, opening up everything from pottery to metalsmithing to plastics production. The Vuun couldn’t look out on their creations, as they and every other living thing on Earth lacked eyes, but they could feel the echoes coming off their growing cities, particularly the earliest ones built along what is now known as the Canadian Shield. Across the world, the Vuun blatting was the only noise heard on the land other than surf and wind, and they found it good.

Not only were the Vuun the only intelligent form on Earth, but due to a galactic mishap, they were also the only intelligent form in most of our galaxy. About two million years before the first Vuun climbed out, the first of the great Radio Wars started, with multiple species receiving radio broadcasts from others, being offended by the content, and deciding that each one was the only appropriate species to flood the electromagnetic spectrum with their cultural detritus. (The last of the Radio Wars ended about 200,000 years before the present, and the reason Earth never encouraged waves of warfleets intent upon turning the inner solar system into asteroidal debris is the bubble of radio jammers spread through the Oort Cloud to prevent our early radio and television broadcasts from reaching deep space. By interplanetary treaty, most of Earth moved to more pinpoint satellite broadcasts starting in the late 1990s, solely to protect the cosmos and the planet from waves of mediocre sitcoms and whiner rock.) During their entire existence, the only time the Vuun encountered other intelligent life was due to visits from the far future or from the time-warping properties of quantum pockets.

The practical upshot was that with no predecessors, no inspiration, and no cautions, the Vuun’s interactions with their world and their timeline combined a deadly hubris with a complete lack of talent and ability to justify the hubris, only seen again a half-billion years later in the Anthropocene with executive MBAs, Marketing majors, weekly newspaper humor columnists, and telecom software developers. In human parallels, the three motivating factors in Vuun psychology were “We should just…”, “You should just…”, and “Leeroy Jeeeeeeenkiiiiiiiiins!” Having no mental filters to balance particularly bad ideas, Vuun politics was like Vuun philosophy was like Vuun debate: quite literally the individual capable of spreading its message the furthest and longest was the one with the most prestige. As the Vuun became more technogically capable, so increased the volume, and the increase in volume increased the odds of some truly stunning behavior.

For about 3 million years, while the urge to lunge at dumb ideas may have affected individuals and groups, the species continued, more out of luck than plan. Efforts to develop pliant rafts of cells capable of manual labor worked extremely well, until the new synthetic forms quit en masse one day, walked into the ocean, and sank to the deepest ocean trenches rather than work for the Vuun again. The Vuun pivoted to non-organic technology, developing early interstellar travel and faster-than-light communication via gravity pulses, only to discover that nobody was listening and nobody cared. By the time the Vunn first developed temporal corridors, the most popular planetary meme of “it’s HOT,” instead of encouraging them to go inside in summer, led to experiments with cooling systems that rapidly caused Earth to slip into a snowball effect, freezing the planet solid except for a narrow band of merely brutally cold conditions at the equator. Further attempts to remedy the freezing by increasing geothermal activity led to a runaway increase of free oxygen in the atmosphere, and the Vuun faced extinction from oxygen euphoria within two generations, leaving the planet free for the so-called “Cambrian explosion” of multicellular life at the end of the Ediacaran Period. Earth’s first experiment in intelligence was so catastrophic that the planet didn’t try again until after the dinosaurs became established, and with good reason.

Even the end of the Ediacaran Period didn’t keep the Vuun from causing further damage. Upon noticing the planet’s rapid glaciation, the Vuun moved to time travel as a possible way out. At first, only information could be passed via temporal corridors, and the search was on for future Earth intelligences that could assist with finding a remedy. This included complete transfer of Vuun intellects to the brains of subsequent sentients, but the Vuun attraction to bright shiny objects meant that the subsequent mental hybrids usually slipped into careers in business, law, and sports trivia, and stayed as far from science as they could. Then, finally, a breakthrough in time corridor technology allowed matter to be moved in bulk, and the Vuun prepared for a mass migration to Anthropocene Earth after encouraging industries and processes that dropped the world oxygen levels to Vuun nominal. Since doublechecking was one of the Vuun equivalents of a mortal sin, the entire species loaded themselves into corridors and jumped into the future…to one second before our current universe imploded to start a new cycle of expansion. So much for the migration and so much for the Vuun.

A few Vuun escaped, currently plying time waves and exploring quantum pockets, mostly acting as an object lesson to other species throughout time and space as to the power of humility. All of them are terribly alone, but as that was their lot even at the height of Vuun civilization, they don’t notice. The synthetic forms they created, though, are very much still extant, and their re-emergence from the oceans in the early 30th Century, with a host of technologies and strategies developed in their millions of years of self-imposed exile made life on Earth at that time very interesting.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Ediacara Radio Wars St. Remedius Vuun