St. Remedius Medical College: “Who Hoaxes the Hoaxers?”

Deception and Counter-Deception

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

While the regulation and commodification of cheap and effective time travel in the late 20th Century (as far as humans were concerned; other species and biota had their own standards about temporal visitation) was instigated specifically to stop paradoxes and incursions, the urge to use the technology or thaumaturgy to do precisely that was nearly overwhelming. Surprisingly, the archives of St. Remedius Medical College contain only a few cases of active meddling in timelines, mostly around major historical events, and none of them successful in the long term. The opportunities for minor chicanery and scams, though, were multifold, usually involving ideology (adding advanced technology to Neolithic or Copper Age burial sites to “prove” crank theories about extraterrestrial involvement in Earth’s past, usually superseded by the accused extraterrestrials releasing their own chronologies) or rank profit. Two stories, though, go decidedly sideways and demonstrate that some temporal interlopers do so just to be perverse.

With the first, an essential trait of modern humanity is to look at something new and ask “Is it something to eat?” (The assembled Denisovian population on Earth uses the term “groolek” to describe their long-lost cousins, an insult translating roughly to “dungbeetle,” and the obsession by their cousins to plumb the expanse of their cuisine is a regular joke at Denisovian Embassy diplomatic dinners.) Potential access to new meals from the past or the future produced multiple waves of companies that formed solely because the CEO dreamed of being the first human to taste dinosaur, oreodont, or doombat. Of particular obsession was the taste sensations of eurypterids, a group of giant marine arthropods ranging through the Paleozoic closely related to modern scorpions and spiders. The anticipation of tearing into lobster analogues that existed 100 million years or more before the possibility of lemon or garlic butter soon turned to horror upon the first taste of a time-snatched eurypterid at an underground diner club that led to the deaths of 28 diners. Unbeknownst to anyone in the 21st Century, eurypterids protected themselves from predators, parasites, and cannibals with a protein that instigated lethal allergic reactions, and the enzymes developed by predators necessary to detoxify that protein died out with their producers in the great P-T extinction. Worse, the few who survived the allergy thanks to prompt medical treatment suffered severe hallucinations for approximately 72 hours. From tragedy comes opportunity, and a competing company made its money not from finding a way to raise and market protein-free eurypterids, but from getting a sample of eurypterid flesh from the dinner, isolating the hallucinogen, and developing a variation that simply led to tingling of the fingers and lips and gentle visions passing in the diner’s peripheral vision. Since they correctly figured that most temporal gourmands would not and could not distinguish between eurypterid and extruded surimi, underground and allegedly highly illegal “Bad Trip Bug” dining events, serving so-called “Kocak fugu,” appeared across North America and Europe, all offering completely legal products but sold to an audience willing to pay and pay well for demonstrative and ostentatious transgression.

A similar situation was responsible for one of the great deliberate paleoanthropological non-hoaxes of the century, when an unrelated arrest of a professional fossil collector turned up a mount of a nearly complete skeleton of Eoanthropus dawsoni, better known as Piltdown Man. The difference, though, was that this one appeared authentic, with documentation confirming the excavation locale, and radioisotope dating and fluorine dating both in the documentation and repeated subsequently confirmed a date of approximately 500,000 years before the present. Much like the hoax, this fossil shared traits with apes and modern humans, with an apelike jaw and humanlike cranium, as well as dextrous hands and legs and spine that confirmed an upright stance, but with a skull and pelvis unlike any other known hominin. The skeleton also came with stone and bone tools that themselves dated to 500,000 BP, with no signs of subsequent reworking or modification with modern tools. Then the reports of other E. dawsoni fossils in seven other private collections started leaking: was it possible that Piltdown Man was real after all?

As a St. Remedius professor unrelated to the investigation joked later, all is possible if you twist the timeline like a hot pretzel. The fossils were authentic, as in they were found buried at a well-documented site and smuggled out of England with just enough of a paper trail to confirm their origins. The stone tools were authentic, and the bone artifacts came from similarly dated elephants, bears, and even a Neandertal skullcap. All eight known specimens were found in what appeared to be a burial ground, with the artifacts spread alongside, and one apparently dug up shortly after death and partially eaten by a scavenger, possibly a hyena, before being reburied. If not for the accidental detection of PFAS traces in a bone sample, the eight specimens would have pointed to the actual existence of E. dawsoni, and interviews with some of the other collectors led to one breaking and admitting the situation. The Piltdown fossils were fakes, and they were real at the same time.

The temporal transgression was effectively an inside joke that got out of hand. The plan by the collectors, known to each other as “The Fletching Collective,” was to use their considerable collective wealth to make the perfect art fake, one that would appear to be authentic to anyone not in on the prank. Gene splicing technology was cheap and effective, orangutan DNA was cheap and effective, and amateur-grade cloning tanks were easily available through online catalogs. The resultant bodies were never expected to wake up and walk, and all they needed was the help of a chronal portal tech with a serious need for untraceable money and the ability to edit portal logs to get them to the desired location. Once in Pleistocene England, they buried the bodies, knapped stone tools from local rock and carved the bone tools from similar local resources, let a hyena dig up a body before shooing it off and reinterring it, let a half-million years do hard work of aging, and excavate the site in their present day, producing lots of layout charts and photos along the way. The fossils were never intended to be sold or given away, or even displayed publicly, but instead as magnificent fakes of which only they knew the true origin. And it almost worked.

Because of this, most human temporal travel, whether technological or thaumaturgic, was even more regulated and watched than before, but occasional oddities still arrived. Some were blatant, such as the hoarding of gold, aluminum, and uranium in the distant past to evade taxation, and some were subtle, such as the library encoded in the Hope Diamond. None, though, seemed to threaten the timeline, at least until the discoveries of weapons and information caches in the eve of the Quantum War.

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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