Greetings To Huey the Deliberately Synthetic St. Bernard
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Every institute of higher learning has the same problem with its student body: trying to convince the majority that they aren’t able to dodge speeding bullets or leap tall buildings on a diet of ramen and beer. Whether the school is an ultrafocused research and development facility pressing the absolute limits of natural laws and human endurance or a party haven where the biggest concern is whether everyone’s favorite dealer will get out of jail in time to get them set up on Friday afternoon, students notoriously ride the machine that is the biological body into ditches, over speedbumps, and off cliffs, whether from benign neglect or by “hypermaxxing body potential” with food and drink substitutes bearing brand names stolen from science fiction satires. Broken foot? Infected tattoo from a poorly considered drunken skin art parlor visit? Multiple visits from earwax vampires? Side effects from alternative therapies recommended and encouraged by a soon-to-be ex? Every university and college has a significant number of students who assume that ignoring the pain and the gangrene will make both go away, and St. Remedius Medical College was no exception. Even with the school’s extensive on-campus emergency room, medical emergencies were ignored, so St. Remedius coordinated with the Engineering department and ER head Dr. “Civvie” Ashcraft to develop a more unintrusive solution.
The end result was “Huey,” popularly but incorrectly described by non-students as the St. Remedius mascot. (The proper mascot was Ashley the Hodag, a perpetual clone of the guardian of the Tomb of the Unknown Bowie at the Alamo in San Antonio.) Taking cues from a Ministry of Agriculture program in New Zealand, Huey was a perfect electronic replica of a St. Bernard, including wet nose and drool (even the best robotic cooling systems could learn from canine brain cooling structures), with thousands of programmed behaviors. Huey could fetch, drag students from burning buildings, swim to rescue drowning students, unlock any security system on campus authorized or not, and kick down doors and gates when required. While Huey could simulate human speech, he was instead usually limited to usual dog barks, whines, and whimpers, followed by an ultrasonic cannon to stun escaping lab animals or unauthorized electronic devices. The cliched St. Bernard barrel of brandy was instead filled with miniature Hueys, which themselves were filled with correspondingly smaller Hueys down to the nanobotic level, allowing immediate first aid and microsurgery for burns, crushing injuries, and electrocution, stabilizing the patient until they could be moved for further treatment. In addition to Huey’s superior vision (extending through ultraviolet and infrared, with an X-ray detector and transmitter for true emergencies) and hearing, each strand of Huey’s fur was a dedicated sensor much like a taste bud on the human tongue. Individually, each hair received limited information, but anyone petting or stroking Huey, or even breathing in his vicinity, gave Huey a wide view of heartbeat, respiration, blood pressure and oxygenation, biochemistry, and detection of toxins, venoms, radioactives, and psychoactives. (Every year, students and staff had to sign an extensive form stating privacy and health information understanding of what Huey could and could not transmit to campus and legal authorities, with a comparable mental health and addiction program for those bearing or using blatantly illegal substances, at least blatantly illegal for that point in space and time, on campus.) Those who avoided Huey were widely outnumbered by the number of students and staff who greeted Huey while on his campus rounds, letting the robot sniff them and discovering any number of issues, from anemia to mummy dust fever, long before these conditions showed symptoms. Huey could also dispense: visitors often looked distraught at what appeared to be a dog spitting out vitamin pills and lozenges to enthusiastic students, and they had more issues with the production of electrolyte drinks and high-fiber protein bars. Nobody could ever say that St. Remedius engineers, especially in the Advanced Technologies department, didn’t have a disturbing sense of humor.
With Huey on the case, student mortality from standard research dropped prodigiously, and students and faculty appreciated both Huey’s presence and his timely alerts on incursions, intrusions, and invasions involving the St. Remedius area. Although everyone understood that Huey was a robot and could have his firmware downloaded to replacement bodies (a feature that surprised more than a few interlopers, particularly during the Harkun incident of 1987), his main interface was so popular that when Advanced Technologies moved to replacing him with a vastly different model, the outrage of the general student body almost started the first riot at St. Remedius in the school’s history. Instead, the original Huey model was upgraded with even more sensor capability, where he served with distinction until the school’s disappearance. Today, the original and his six replacement bodies patrol as a pack in contested areas around quantum pockets in North America, constantly watching for invasive swarms of pikas.
(Want someone to blame? Blame Jess Nevins. It’s all his fault.)
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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