St. Remedius Medical College: “The Ghost In The Server”

When Electronic Immortality Strikes Back

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

Long before the formation of the original Order of St. Remedius, the general consensus on the ability to preserve a presence after death was not only accepted by mystics and religious leaders, but accepted as a given. Some self remained around a body well after all vital signs ceased, depending upon the will and the ego of the individual, and much of that tended to linger around places and objects that were important to that individual. It was only after the formation of St. Remedius Medical College and its subsequent investigations that anyone realized the situation was considerably more complex than anyone thought.

One of the first serious St. Remedius studies in what happens to the human life force, known as necroz, involved learning what happens to the spirit behind it. Contrary to expectations, the necroz usually dissipates shortly after death, and most recognized hauntings and possessions did not involve distinctive personalities, which completely rewrote everything previously assumed about such events. Strong emotions were usually tied to strong memories, though, and those left a pattern on an individual’s necroz, causing it to linger in places and around objects connected to those memories. In isolated areas, the necroz tended to remain in the general area, but cities and other large gathering places of the dead left necroz flowing across the area, with unattached energy creeping toward emotional consolidations, often building up to a critical mass. Claims of hauntings tended to concentrate at abandoned and decommissioned hospitals for precisely that reason: necroz tended to flow out and around as patients, visitors, and staff moved in and out, but remove the living people and the energy consolidated and recycled, leading to lights, aurorae and thunderstorms, fireballs, and occasionally manifestations of long-denied memories leading to the destruction of the area. A significant amount of research in St. Remedius’s Metaphysics Department through the 1950s and 1960s Gregorian Calendar involved discovering and perfecting ways to channel off and store necroz before it became dangerous to the living, with varying results. Since the human sense of smell has such a close connection to memory, amateur methods to dispel necroz are highly dissuaded, to the point where purchase and possession of prepared sweetgrass, sage, and clove cigarettes have required a Zwinge Foundation license and certification in most jurisdictions since the Waco Incident in 1999.

A regular observation when studying necroz is that attachment or focus on objects or places are due to those strong memories and not any inherent feature of the subject. This means that in many cases, making exact duplicates of the subject in question and putting the duplicates near the original polarizes available necroz, allowing it to be drawn off with the duplicates and dispersed or utilized. This was noticed very early with church relics and artifacts, but St. Remedius was the first to put it to gainful work. By the time of its disappearance, St. Remedius offered several graduate programs in advanced necromancy specifically focusing on dispelling, using, or concentrating necroz accumulations, including the use of natural and artificial landmarks (mountains, pyramids, monoliths, and henges, among many others) to cast particularly large and intense accumulations into deep space.

The study of necroz did more than make the concept of poltergeists as obsolete as phlogiston. The so-called veil was confirmed to be a completely impenetrable curtain between the current space-time continuum and the poles of poles, and any so-called visitations were echoes of mutual memories, not an actual spirit attempting communication or retribution. Likewise, any claims of a lack of visitation due to a loved one moving on to an afterlife drastically different from any they believed in, such as a born-again Christian reincarnating or a Bokononist going to Mictlan or Valhalla, only allowed survivors to blame any suspected calls from the deceased on guilty consciences or mental illness. Their receiving suspected visitations were merely levels of necroz building to effective levels, usually revealing the reasons for those guilty consciences soon enough. A famed example in the St. Remedius archives involved what would have been a successful heavy metal poisoning with unbleached thallium had levels of necroz not been drawn to the tea tin that supplied the deadly element, causing it to leap off the counter and out of cupboards whenever police were in the vicinity, with no effect when fraudulent “exorcists” claimed to send the deceased spirit back to its intended destination.

A particularly dangerous effect of necroz accumulation only became obvious after the popularization of the internet in the late 1990s Gregorian. Previous concentrations had been connected to photos, portraits, and sculptures for centuries, with an increase of incidents involving music, especially with increasingly obsolete forms. The Waco Incident of 1999, for instance, was tracked to a music and musical instrument shop carrying a wide collection of vinyl, 8-tracks, and cassette tapes, and a collectible toy shop almost took out Fort Worth a decade later. With the expansion of online activity, necroz practically saturated electronic media, from 5 1/4-inch floppy discs to advanced video servers, and the situation went critical when social media became a major activity in the early 21st Century. To this day, discarded blog servers, webcam equipment, podcast microphones, and other social media essentials are treated with the same caution and care as fission reactor waste, and without specialized methods and equipment to dissipate all traces, random cries of “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” and “New posting coming soon!” coming from abandoned studios and offices theoretically could be heard for centuries.

One final effect discovered by St. Remedius researchers was that necroz concentrations, if not disturbed by sentient activity in the vicinity, could sustain themselves for thousands and even millions of years, even after the original anchor was dust. With this knowledge, archeologists could map cities, towns, and historically significant locations (battlefields, sacrifice sites, and open markets) that otherwise left no recognizable trace. Among others, this left more questions than answers on sites that coincided with the great Ordovician meteor event, as well as sites that correspond with no known indigenous or visiting sentient. A series of necroz promontories in West Texas coinciding with Triassic fossil beds continue to intrigue those certain that the Cretaceous Conglomerate and the Vuun were not the only significant nonhuman indigenous intelligences in Earth’s early history. Research from other organizations continues, but if anyone from St. Remedius had instigated any research for the College’s disappearance, it shows no trace in current archives.

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.

Metaphysics necromancy Necroz St. Remedius Zwinge Foundation