St. Remedius Medical College: “Time Before Time Travel”

Trials and Tribulations of Chrononauts New and Established

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

One of the great assumptions about time travel is that the process of developing a working system is difficult and/or dangerous. As multiple individuals, species, and civilizations demonstrate over and over, implementing the basics of time travel theory is remarkably easy, and becomes inevitable once a civilization starts believing its own hype about “The Singularity” and the only options for escape from utter and terminal boredom involve time, space, or a suitably large and dense mass planted firmly in a main autonomous nerve cluster or processor. (Many historians of many times and locales note that the critical juncture where a civilization either starts planning to convert its planetary system into Dyson swarms or detonating its sun and every other sun within a ten-lightyear radius is whether Big Thinks on a par with “It’s on the Viridian List! Have I mentioned the Viridian List?” go mainstream.) Time travel is easy: cheap and effective time travel, the sort that allows an average person to go back to their distant past, encounter their previous childhood self, and give that previous self a thorough lecture on studiousness and potentially disastrous life decisions punctuated with the judicious application of a baseball bat or axe handle, is considerably tougher, and many individuals who attempt the latter never reach it.

Another aspect involved what later became known as “Ketterley’s Law,” after the Victorian chrononaut and inventor Miss Christine Ketterley. Much in the tone of James Davis Nicoll‘s Law (“Any sufficiently powerful battery pack for a portable hand laser weapon would be more effective in combat as a grenade”), Ketterley’s Law states “Any time travel method’s efficiency is in inverse proportion to the number of safeguards required to stave off hijacking, piracy, or murder for profit.” While Nicoll’s Law became quaint shortly after its creation (the patents and treaties for zero-point energy inverters for laser weapons, mechs, spacecraft, and planetary construction equipment were a major source of St. Remedius Medical College revenues), Ketterley’s Law continues to apply, both with extant chronal travelers and ones only known from archeological debris.

One of the most obvious hazards of time travel involves hijacking, especially in war zones, totalitarian dictatorships, and multinational corporations. One of the great literary tropes, transcending eras and galaxies, involves the charming and almost attainable chrononaut who appears in a dreary office worker’s life and spirits him/her off for a life of adventure, excitement, and constant danger, none of which are available in a contemporary environment of filing endless TPS reports. The newbie time traveler usually has no idea of the desperation behind the trope, especially if their time capsule suffers a catastrophic failure and requires repair before it can continue its journey. For every time traveler who returns to a fixed locale with tales of bouncing through the timeline, and for every five that become food for hungry tyrannosaurs or mutated post-humans 802,000 years in the far future (usually not realizing that they were trapped in a refuge allowing those post-humans a limited zoo environment separating them from the true rulers of the planet at the time), at least forty to fifty found themselves clonked on the head and their vehicle wrecked, consigned to a similar life of drudgery when none of their life skills translated to anything usable in their new time, or turned into sex slaves after severe surgical augmentation “so you look more like David Tennant.” In fact, a popular guide to time travel etiquette warns of being stranded in the early 21st Century Gregorian, where approximately half of the job listings seeking individuals with years of experience in skills that had only become available months earlier were phishing attempts to snag marooned time travelers. Some were by corporations inches from liquidation that hoped a sudden infusion of new technology might make up for years of ketamine abuse. Some were by basement-dwellers who figured that stealing a time machine for temporal piracy was easier than doing the work of making a new one, only to discover the presence of dead zones everywhere. Most, though, were fans of the ebook series “60 Seconds Of Desire” and had no compunction with trapping travelers “until they loved me.”

Hence, after the first exposure to the 21st Century, time travelers built in safeguards. Vital signs sensors and DNA detectors. Increasingly elaborate keys for activation. Codewords jettisoning the capsule’s power source, motivators, and/or regulators with three incorrect entries. Ever more elaborate chatbots keyed to signs of coercion, either into the traveler’s seat or out of it. Larkash travelers made healthy incomes from selling “shock suits,” a silky web undergarment that deterred physical assaults of all types with a healthy jolt of electricity to connecting tissues or manipulators. The problem was that the timestream drag by these accessories generally slowed travel: without a sufficiently powerful activation source, such as a modified black hole, a reasonable collection of systems to protect traveler and machine slowed temporal expansion to as little as one year of objective time to one day of subjective time. Some travelers specialized in “stripped” machines, with only the absolute minimum safeguards for a single pilot in exchange for the ability to visit time periods billions of years in the traveler’s past or future, and the smattering of dust comprising machine and rider often greets subsequent visitors with more patience and augmentation.

Because of these risks, many regular temporal travelers encourage solidarity with others, with some happy to step in and assist new explorers in sticky situations. This may or may not have been the basis for the famed St. Remedius Time Traveler Balls, but it definitely encouraged their attendance and popularity.

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.

Larkash Miss Christine Ketterley St. Remedius time travel