St Remedius Medical College: “Web Status”

Networks Upon Networks Upon Networks

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

The great quandary of the last billion years: the universe is too vast to grasp, and seemingly deliberately so. At one time, the universe was small enough to traverse its distance with relatively simple technologies, and the shame was that the conditions that short a time after the Big Bang were unsuited for both those technologies and the development of intelligences to invent them. By the time elements other than hydrogen and helium were easily available, it was already too late. By the time the universe cooled enough to allow long-lived stars, the dream of traveling across the universe went from taking days to taking multiple lifetimes. On one side, the constants of relativity kept everyone bound to the speed of photons. On the other, breaking through, bypassing, or dropkicking relativity had their own costs, sometimes terrible costs. The energy necessary to move even one being of any size any significant distance in the universe was available, ultimately, but not to all and certainly not to those in a hurry.

While the overwhelming majority of sentients in our own galaxy focused on moving whole biological or electronic systems across the spatial depths within a reasonable time, one went in precisely the opposite direction. Developing on a world on the ever-expanding edge of the universe, the beings known as Blue Yaw knew that even their closest galactic neighbors were far too distant to visit, much less conduct a conversation, with travel times being such that those neighbors could be long-extinct by the time any information on their existence reached them. Likewise, the Blue Yaw understood that the universe was so big that other intelligences were developing all the time, and waiting for those intelligences to catch up might take more time than the Blue Yaw had available. Instead, they decided both to bring the party to everyone, and be the perfect guests at he same time.

For a fraction of the mass and energy necessary to send fleets of advanced craft to just one world, the Blue Yaw visited thousands a day. Each reception mass was a sphere about the size of a baseball, launched via raingun at every star in their sky and then at every potential star, each sphere packed with replicates and quantum-packed data. Many missed their intended targets, or arrived to find the system completely hostile to anything approximating intelligence. Those traveled on. The ones that discovered planetary systems at least capable of supporting life discharged small portions of their mass toward those worlds and moons and kept going. Those packets hit the surface and dug in, the replicates extracting aluminum and iron, platinum and gold, carbon and iodine, and burrowed beneath the surface, leaving microscopic webs behind them as they built more units and spread through the available lithosphere. Eventually, the whole world was gently but thoroughly enveloped with a network of tiny nodes, each with tiniersensory nodes detecting temperature, pressure, atmospheric composition, and light and radio. Many such worlds remained covered, waiting passively for signs of biological, chemical, or mechanical activity that might never come. With the very few that fought against the laws of thermodynamics and forged order from surrounding entropy, the nodes passed signals to each other in anticipation, watching and listening for a predetermined selection of inputs suggesting a certain level of social sophistication. When the nodes collected enough data, the replicates shifted from networking to generation, building bodies best simulating the Blue Yaw’s form based on local resources and gravity, gradually growing out of the surrounding regolith, and attempting to interact with the indigenous forms. Many times, accidents or cosmic calamities left the nets waiting further. Some times, the indigenous forms responded negatively to the replicated Blue Yaw. Very occasionally, the indigenous forms refused to interface with the Blue Yaw, in which case the nets contracted to one point, built self-launch options, and left the world in peace to continue the quest. Many times, though, the Blue Yaw existed long after they and their system were blasted into dust when their original star went supernova, rebuilt over and over across the universe with a collection of their knowledge and culture to share with anyone asking for it. Each reconstituted Blue Yaw association was different due to the general conditions, which would have pleased their progenitors to no end.

Earth was one of the many worlds eventually reached by the Blue Yaw replicates, and over the last 500 million years to the present day Gregorian received multiple packages of Blue Yaw tech and information. Unlike most of the other potential habitable worlds in our system, and even such hellworlds as Venus and Jupiter’s innermost Galilean moon Io, the Blue Yaw’s touch never settled in on Earth, and discovery of Blue Yaw webs on Mars, Callisto, and Titan only furthered the mystery. It was only in the earlier parts of the 21st Century Gregorian that researchers at St. Remedius Medical College discovered that this was because Earth already had an extensive organic network comparable to the Blue Yaw webs, consisting of mycorrhizal networks produced by terrestrial fungi and spreading deep within and across the planet. These networks were so pervasive and so thorough that the Blue Yaw replicates were treated like the indigenous nematodes upon which the fungal nets fed and absorbed before they had a chance to spread. The fungal nets still resist all efforts to learn their origins, confirm whether they were native to Earth or introduced in a similar manner as the Blue Yaw, and if they have a similar function once any of Earth’s intelligent species reach an unknown level of sophistication. What is known for sure is that the Earth networks are extremely prolific, extremely hard to sterilize, and as adaptable as the Blue Yaw webs, with some evidence that the crash of Mars’s underground ecosystem approximately 20 million years ago was due to the webs’ accidental introduction. As it stands, the webs appear to be quietescent, with little risk of spatial or temporal visitors spreading spores or fragments to other places and times, but that could change at any time. In the meantime, the public is requested to report any signs of unusual fungal activity in fields, forests, and jockstraps to any available authorities, and leave any contact with new entities to professionals: some individuals report mild signals from ingested or otherwise absorbed web tissue, but the meaning of those signals is still inconclusive and probably not intended for humans.

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.

Blue Yaw fungus St. Remedius