St. Remedius Radio: “The Misery of Nostalgia”

A Discussion of the Jeffty Gene

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

When formally recognized and described in 1998, the Jeffty Gene, named after the first individual in the scientific literature with the phenomenon, was a breakthrough in chronal research. Individuals with the gene had the capability, usually manifested in childhood, of bending time progression, keeping them in a semi-pocket of time while normal progression and expansion of space-time continued. Think of it as a small but dense object atop a dining room table as someone attempted to pull the tablecloth off. Some cases moved along eventually, leaving ripples and eddies in space-time in the efforts to bring them along. Others were immovable under prevailing forces, forcing time to stick with them, at least in their general vicinity. Still others could tear the fabric of space-time, burn holes in it, or even split it and the infrastructure beneath.

As a rule, possessors of the Jeffty Gene had problems with their erratic effects on time. Many who first saw symptoms in their childhood never left, perpetually remaining at that age as friends and family aged and died. Before official acknowledgement, some possessors were used and abused by those who saw the advantages of remaining in a particular pocket of a particular year. Others only accessed the gene in old age, with everyone around them gradually swirled back to the possessor’s optimal time. Even those who managed to live through and acknowledge their singular conditions have problems: famed Jeffty Gene spokeswoman Blake Starshadow may have been one of St. Remedius Medical College’s greatest historians, but everything around her, from books to electronics to soft drinks, all gradually morphed into versions that would have been available to her while she was in high school. The gene had no effect on other sentients, but this only encouraged those who wanted to remain in the proximity of a Jeffty in the hopes that maybe, possibly, they might capture some of that ability themselves.

The other aspect of the Jeffty Gene, one that worried St. Remedius researchers, was the unpredictable effects of having more than one bearer in a specific time and place. Sometimes they cancelled each other out, with horrendous backlash effects on each other. Sometimes they made their particular chronal anchors worse, affecting wider and wider areas. Some Jeffty Gene gatherings set off timestorms which shook quantum pockets and set off timequakes often mistaken for the gravity waves from black hole collisions. And sometimes, terribly, they ripped space-time, with whole years and sometimes decades shredded and removed from the timestream. The people of Mesoamerica understood how this could happen, if not why, and built their calendars to take into account the spiral nature of time, which held general cohesion and shape even as pieces were removed. Most famously in the West, the switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar was incited by a very specific incident that removed four weeks without recall, possibly explaining why for Jeffty Gene bearers under that calendar, their birthdays always fall on February 30.

And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.

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.

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