St. Remedius Medical College: "When Dinosaurs Podcast the Earth"

A study in temporal flotsam and how the past can come back to bite the future in the butt

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

Possibly one of the greatest strengths of humanity is its mental flexibility verging on utter delusion. Other species facing constant onslaught of invaders, usurpers, innovators, collaborators, and influencers from across time, space, and the magickal realms would spend their final months in catatonia, unable to process the changes to their objective reality and deciding that complete oblivion was the only sane option. Humanity, though, entered the Twenty-First Century CE/99th Century Plowshare (a universally accepted standard for carbon-based life forms, from the point where managed agriculture became a statistically significant source of nutrients for a majority of the existing population) completely saturated in visitations from the depths of quantum reality, and so long as most could get a cup of morning coffee, life went on. It was impossible to say that humans became bored with the constant influx of exonormal stimuli, but with each invasion, colonization, regurgitation, transcendentation, and remediation, the general attitude for those outside the immediate line of fire was “We’re about to learn a valuable lesson.”

Possibly the best example since the founding of St. Remedius Medical College came with the invasion of the psittacosaurian Harkun in 1987. While the initial rush of invasion ended with little to no human memory of any action, the Harkun survivors later became VERY noticed. Since actual surrender was complete anathema to the Harkun psyche, the remnants of the invasion force, seeing as how their native quantum pocket closed shortly after their defeat and return to the rest of their civilization was impossible, the 2261 soldiers and executives remaining behind in our continuum were given the option of a carefully delineated allocation of land for them to settle, so long as they ceased hostilities. Naturally, this was a complete abdication of everything in Harkun civilization: the species imperative was to dominate all opposition. Instead, they pivoted.

An essential aspect about Harkun psychology was its determination to win at any cost, but another was its determination to win fairly at any cost. Lies, cheating, blatant deception…only utter psychopaths thought that these were acceptable, and fraud was one of the worst crimes a Harkun could commit and was therefore punished appropriately. Live video feeds of a Harkun grifter at the bottom of a pit toilet at a perinool festival, floats around the neck and a chain connecting the grifter’s foot to the bottom, were entertainments for hatchlings, and the greatest thing any Harkun could do in their modern society was identify, capture, and prosecute scammers and liars, and hefty rewards and percentages of merchandise sales from perinool executions encouraged this further.

By the standards of pretty much every sentient encountering them, the Harkun were undeniably disagreeable, and bringing this up with Harkun envoys always received a response of “Thank you very much for noticing. You gain nothing from flattery, though.” Winning, whether in business, law, games, simulations, or debate, rested on each Harkun knowing it did so by completely overwhelming their opponents. This meant obsessively studying every facet and every contingency of an opponent, so that when a Harkun stood over a vanquished and completely destroyed rival, everyone understood that this ending was inevitable from the moment the conflict started. When Harkun started fights of any sort, it was after months, years, and even centuries of careful and methodical preparation, according to centuries of established precedent for the application of appropriate force, and with assurance that the opponent was taken down completely fairly and honestly because the Harkun were great and opponents were scum unworthy to be scraped off their cloacas. Special dispensation existed for creators of arts that presented speculations and deliberate falsehoods, which required a declaration of draah and chaah, the Harkun equivalent of pantomiming quotation marks, at the beginning and end of any performance or display. If a statement was not preceded with draah and ended with chaah, then it was to be taken at face value, with all of the penalties and privileges therein.

When offered conditional amnesty at the end of the Dallas Invasion, human behavior enraged the Harkun at first. Those in authority were allowed to lie without prior declaration, with no repercussions! No punishments! Many were even rewarded for the sheer ridiculousness of their falsehoods! For about a decade, the Harkun collectively remained inside their reservations, refusing all contact with anyone else, and most humans assumed that they were too xenophobic to assimilate into Earth society. That, as humanity discovered to its detriment, was a horrible misunderstanding of the reality. In their way, the Harkun never actually ended hostilities, and they saw a perfect opportunity to win the war AND do so with absolute purity in the eyes of their fellows and of their gods. In their own way, they planned to kill humanity with Harkun kindness.

The Harkun had precious few connections with humans at first: habits, recreation, and even cuisine had almost no parallels. The vagaries of infinite recombinations never produced parallel foods that allowed a commonality: most Harkun foods required both possession of a gizzard and spectacular control of the gag reflex for any other carbon-based species to consider more than a taste, and that taste usually etched and corroded the appropriate tissues. In fact, “Swedish meatballs” became a favorite Harkun pejorative for humans, filling a gap for “you ape primitives will eat anything” that the Harkun didn’t know they needed. There was no connection via religion: the Harkun had over 50 deities, one of whom was selected at adulthood for a lifetime vendetta only settled by traveling to the deity’s realm and destroying that god in single combat. (The few Harkun who ever succeeded discovered that their gods had left millions of years before, purely out of self-preservation. The search goes on.)

The one exception at first turned into a pivotal situation with human-Harkun diplomacy. As with humans, the Harkun believed in an infinite number of foci acting in an infinite number of methodologies producing great cultural works completely at random, and the first translations of human culture revealed an incredible commonality: the works of Shakespeare. Not all of The Bard’s works, though: fictional races could talk about watching Hamlet or Much Ado About Nothing in their original language, but cultural attaches were stunned to discover that the greatest work of literature in Harkun history was a nearly line-for-line parallel to a Shakespeare play, written 100 million years before the first hominin walked upright on the African savannah. The fact that the play in question was Titus Andronicus was no surprise to anyone of either species, and discovering that the Harkun had access to plays even more horrific and disgusting started a run of movie adaptations, with both Harkun and human actors, with and without subtitles, but always in the one perfect tongue.

What humanity discovered was that the Harkun were absolute masters at insult and outrage, made even worse by their obsession with complete honesty. When a Harkun slammed a human institution, figurative or literal, that assessment came after methodically studying exactly how to cause the most damage with each word or gesture. Only the strongest-willed humans could withstand a Harkun critique intended as “complimentary,” and truly negative assessments could potentially lead to fatal shame and horror. Harkun were one of the only sentients studied by St. Remedius that had absolutely no psychic or psionic potential, but their declarations of disgust and dismissal almost seemed telepathic in their ability to burrow past the strongest mental and emotional defenses.

Because of their inherent honesty and calculation, the first jobs Harkun took in human society were in the legal profession. Any defense or prosecution lawyer attempting to use anything other than the absolute truth against a Harkun lawyer found themselves verbally dissected during opening statements, and every round of discovery was undertaken with the precision of a faster-than-light trek to the Magellanic Clouds. Within ten years, every first-year law student learned about the massive government lawsuit that ended moments after it started with a Harkun prosecutor pointing to a child in the courtroom, looking at the defense lawyer, and asking “Nice child. Does your brother know you cheat on him?”, and then gently dropping similar nuggets on every member of the defense team, leaving most of them catatonic. And considering that the Harkun taboo against incest was so much stronger than with humans, most cases with Harkun versus human lawyers ended with rapid settlements before the Harkun lawyer could build up speed.

(For years, one of the most popular streaming programs on Earth was a live feed of two particularly talented Harkun debaters, parrying and thrusting in their own language with subtitles in most human languages, discussing current affairs. Most humans watching each night’s debate prayed to whatever deities they had that this level of vitriol never pointed in their direction.)

Any reasonable sentient would assume, with justification, that verbally tangling with any Harkun got what everybody deserved. What surprised the Harkun were the number of humans willing to pay for that level of focused torment and abuse. Several Harkun became standup comedians and podcast commentators, dispassionately mocking every last member of a studio audience while the recipients giggled, and many in that audience paid even more for personal one-on-one assessments of their unworthiness to steal oxygen from coliform bacteria. The absolute worst insult a Harkun could offer was to turn around and grumble “You are not worth my time,” and plenty of supplicants deserved that assessment. Humanity had a seemingly insatiable humiliation kink, and the Harkun were happy to take tokens and trade to make the ape usurpers overrunning their planet SQUEAL.

Finally, as with all good things, it had to end. The Harkun had won, and with no new challenges, the entire population purchased access to a quantum pocket that opened once every thousand years and moved inside, letting humanity know their true feelings for the first time as the pocket entrance closed. When this pocket reopens, everyone on Earth knows that the Harkun will have had a millennium to prepare for a further onslaught of human sensibilities and achievements, and for some, their only regret was that they wouldn’t live to get the tongue-lashing they felt they deserved.

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.

Harkun St. Remedius