Be Careful Where You Leave Your Refuse
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
An aspect of exonormal research that receives far too little consideration is post-use management. “Post-use management” is distinguished from “waste management” mostly due to the understanding that an item, collection, or site may no longer be necessary for a specific use, but it still interacts with its environment and the sentient forms therein, often in dangerous or in at least annoying ways. A case in point from the St. Remedius Medical College annals involves the Eidolon Bunker, an underground chamber dug north of downtown Dallas and about 3000 meters down and 500 meters round by an otherwise unknown intelligence approximately 50,000 years before the present. When first discovered in 1948 in what was then a wheat field along the roadway that later became the infamous Central Expressway, the Bunker was completely full of loess from the last glacial regression, flood debris from surrounding streams, road dust, leaves, grass bits, and the occasional Columbian mammoth and glyptodont that tripped into the sole opening after its presumed abandonment. A thorough excavation revealed that the Bunker was a bunker in name only, and had been emptied of everything, even genetic traces, and thus no practical use could be assigned without more information. What complicated matters was that the entire bunker was composed as a synthetically reinforced artificial molecule that rendered it immune to digging tools, explosives, corrosive chemicals, and radiant weapons. Today, the Eidolon Bunker and the land over it are kept in special reserve if in case the builders made claims on the site, but the cleared interior is the site of 9446 Central, an extremely popular restaurant and nightclub assembled piece-by-piece inside the Bunker and accessible by gondola lowered down through the chamber’s throat. The impermeability of the Bunker’s walls required significant consideration of its development (the gondola’s passing by the electrical cables, ventilation snorkel shafts, and water and sewer lines that keep 9446 Central alive is considered part of the experience), but the underground experience allows light and sound shows impossible on the surface, or at least within the limits of any city with a population above 50.
Most of the time, though, the need for post-use management involved interactions between products and effects never considered at the time of their creation. By the time of St. Remedius’s disappearance, the greater Dallas area was saturated with ambient thaumaturgic and psionic energies left over from previous years, which tended to interact with technological, nanobot, and biological debris and detritus in completely unexpected ways. A fireworks cantrip from 1979, a spectral calling signature to reach a deceased grandparent attempted in 1983, and the remnants of a starship auto-repair system scattered over the area in 67,238,119 BCE connect thanks to a quantum query signal from the Denisovian Embassy in downtown, and the 100-meter flaming ghost stomping down the length of Dallas North Tollway meant an hour of St. Remedius investigators sending the entity back to the spirit realms and six months of St. Remedius remediators doing their utmost to prevent it from happening every time a quantum query switch went off in the vicinity.
A perfect example involved the must-have Christmas decoration of 2016, The Fractal Christmas Tree. A fusion of nanotech and botanomagic that generated the tree’s own lights, anchored it into nearly any surface, and exuded pheromones that convinced wayward cats and squirrels to cause terror elsewhere, the trees also had the advantage of self-packing for easy disposal in standard trash facilities. As such, millions of unneeded Fractal Christmas Tree cubes sat on curbs and in dumpsters all over the Dallas area, where they would have passed through the city’s waste stream without noticeable effect. That is, except those near vehicles, carts, and sleds, where a wayward etherflow intended to capture air pollution as a potential energy source (particularly from the hydrogen sulfide fug coming from the Trinity River riverbed in late summers) fused the fractal trees to any mobility source and sent them on a migration rampage north, stopping not for soldier, mage, or technomancer. Fire, sonics, anti-resurrectives…all failed to slow the cyborg trees, especially when they showed signs of both organized intelligence and mind-stripping anger at their abandonment. Once again, humanity learned that murderous cyborgs intent upon destroying the whole species don’t need to be composed of tetrapod flesh, and only a last-second hunch by Dr. Calliope Pendergast at St. Remedius revealed that the cyber-trees were best corralled to a path leading directly to the Allen Crater north of the city. The metal and biomass slowly roiling and shifting in the crater, after the trees willingly jumped in, is still monitored to this day, particularly because of hints of radio signals coming from the crater suggesting either communication with something Elsewhere or a further conglomeration into something new. As to what that may be is unknown: drones and familiars flown over the crater mass disappear, even ones passing in low Earth orbit. As for other combinations elsewhere, this explains why St. Remedius graduates were and still are very much in demand as landfill monitors.
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.
Discover more from The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.