St. Remedius Medical College: “All I Want For Christmas Is YOU.”

Discovered At Last: What Killed the Dinosaurs (And Your Quiet Weekend Is Now Doomed)

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

By the beginning of the 21st Century Gregorian Calendar, fads, trends, and memes were still at a very minimal level of replication ability, at about the same level of sophistication as random chunks of RNA floating in Earth’s first oceans. The advent of email gave them a fantastic growth medium, but still nothing compared to the first wave of social media. By the year 2015, memes and tropes were evolving at an exponential rate, and the first use of generative AI brought forth monsters. By the time “One Weird Trick” and “They HATE This” became a standard part of most languages, comparable to “Don’t EVER read the comments,” the meme ecosystem moved to a whole new level, reaching the comparable stage of evolution as bacteria able to spread genes to unrelated bacteria. Some were comparable to the tulip breaking virus, appearing as quirks or artifacts in videos and images after scraper bots pulled their attributes from infected files and incorporated them in new configurations. Most of the time, this was relatively harmless, if annoying. Some times, though, either those new configurations became deadly, or they came in contact with new memes that sent them over the edge.

Since the development of radio reception by humans in the early 20th Century, St. Remedius Medical College was the first line of defense against potentially hostile transmissions coming from outside, whether from deep space radio, gravitational wave signals, Von Neumann probes seeking physical contact, artifacts from the deep past or future caught on chronal tides and cast out in the present day, and the occasional visitation. For over a century, Earth was bathed in wave after wave of memes attempting a foothold in the planet’s social ecosystem, with most held off due to our main civilization’s aptitude in cultivating and exploiting native mental byproducts. (The spread of “I’d Hit That,” “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” and “Goatse” on MySpace and LiveJournal in the early 2000s were symptoms of potentially severe memetic infections that only stopped once their vectors, desperately underemployed twentysomethings taking breaks while jobhunting, found lives off those forums and escaped.) Most bounced off, being too alien or too obscure to get a grip on human popular culture. Some clicked on entirely the wrong aspects of culture, as evidenced with the great Elf On the Shelf War of 2015, with millions of surveillance bots only succumbing to integrated pest management. The ultimate, though, was the Holiday Movie Drinking Game.

Fluctuations within the star KIC 8462852, approximately 1,470 light-years from Earth, showed wild variations in its intensity, dimming and brightening repeatedly over the last ten years of observation. While surmisals for the dimming included dust clouds and the beginnings of Dyson array construction, the best model suggested a moon or planet disintegrating and the debris remaining dense enough to explain the dimming as it orbited the star. While St. Remedius astronomers picked up some traces of what might have been artificial radio transmissions in the 1970s, these were inconclusive, with broadcasts from known civilizations overwhelming the sparse signals. Curiously, spectroscopic analysis of the debris cloud showed a massive cloud of ethyl alcohol spreading through the system, suggesting organic biological processes on a hitherto unknown scale. About a week after the discovery of the alcohol cloud, the first incontrovertible signals were picked up throughout the solar system, with the usual efforts to quarantine and analyze the signal before passing information to the general public.

Unfortunately for all, the release of that signal, thought to be completely harmless, coincided with the international debut of Holidays In The Sun, the latest Christmas season romantic comedy free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel, promising nothing but the most wholesome “big city slicker moves to small town and finds love and the meaning of Christmas” movies all day and all year. FAST programming was already overloaded with these, but Holidays In The Sun distinguished itself by planning a viewing game that could be printed out or mailed out from the head office, and it promised “this game is going to be something DIFFERENT.” How different, they had no idea.

The subsequent review of the incident suggested that the KIC 8462852 signal hit the Internet about two days before Holidays In the Sun finished its game rules and prepared to release them to the public. Unbeknownst to Holidays staff, the signal was a compressed meme seeking a suitable host to complete its cycle, like a bacteriophage virus, and it found a perfect one in the Holidays game. Whatever the original game plan, viewers who downloaded or ordered their game rules got a drinking game poking fun at the movies’ cliches, the struggling actors repeatedly used for different movies, and the songs featured on each soundtrack. “Take a drink when you see an ugly sweater or tie,” “Finish your drink if it starts snowing on Christmas,” “Take a shot if two enemies fall in love,” and the like. Below the rules was a QR code promising additional rules and a chance to win a Christmas cruise for two to Tulum, Mexico if players scanned it. Those “additional rules” included drink recipes, holiday snack recipes, a review of festive sex lubes, and a detailed schematic for gene-editing E. coli bacteria, using common household materials, that produced alcohol from just about any organic substance. Old linoleum, road tar, navel lint, dog vomit…all went into a pot and came out 180 proof.

In the early hours, emergency rooms had the usual run of alcohol poisonings, failed livers and kidneys, rectal prolapses, and catatonic despair from attempting to make the pain go away that accompanied every holiday movie season. They were eclipsed by those with no prior interest or even knowledge of Christmas traditions fervently stalking through grocery store aisles for egg nog and cranberry juice, and getting frantic if the store was out of cinnamon, nutmeg, and peppermint. From giant box stores to bodegas, viewers who downloaded the additional rules found themselves compelled to be festive, buying up supplies for baking, making their own tinsel from aluminum foil, and ripping up hedges outside the stores to make wreaths. Others broke themselves falling from trees in attempts to gather mistletoe, and others terrified children and animals with attempts to sing. During the standard 20-minute commercial breaks, they then climbed up on roofs to install handmade decorations, rigged colored light packs on cars and bicycles, and packaged up random trash for “presents.” And, always, truly heroic amounts of drinking at the appropriate cues. Well-intentioned family members, friends, and co-workers, attempting to get victims to sober up, found themselves compelled to try “just one taste,” and they quickly sat down and joined in. Within 24 hours, a significant part of North America had succumbed to the holiday cheer, with the rest of the planet following suit, and then the E. coli broke free and started processing swamplands and rivers. If left unchecked, every bit of organic matter on Earth would have been turned into Everclear and tree decorations within a year, with the entirety of intelligent life on the planet waiting to see which special guest star was worthy of another shot before Earth’s atmosphere became flammable.

The surviving records from St. Remedius Medical College are missing large sections of its recent history, including what efforts it made to keep our planet from becoming a pole-to-pole margarita. What is known for sure is that a special team of bacteriologists, led by the St. Remedius Bromley Contingent legend Dr. Morag Feinstein, managed to reverse the impending cataclysm, and a set of grad students worked out how to neutralize and reverse the compulsion meme, but at a terrible cost. To this day, High Cliff State Park in Wisconsin has several springs of pure alcohol at the summit, rarely visited due to the surrounding population being decimated from mincemeat poisoning. Whatever the cost, Earth was spared the fate of KIC 8462852’s sole inhabitable planet, the bacterium was stopped dead, and millions of holiday movie addicts went back to healthy addictions to pumpkin spice brisket. Rumor suggests that a radical group modified and fine-tuned a variant bacillus to facilitate another holiday, with the perpetual town of Halloween Haunts, Texas, full of strawmen and bat-winged vampire girls, as the only remaining trace.

(Many thanks to Scott Clevinger for starting the horror)

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.

Christmas Cheer Dr. Morag Feinstein KIC 8462852 St. Remedius