St. Remedius Medical College: “Paradoxes Go Both Ways”

The Assumption Is That Temporal Anomalies Only Affect the Future

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

One of the greatest conceits about time travel, and one of the reasons why it remains possible, is the assumption that travelers can make significant and enduring changes from their own actions. More often than not, the timeline is damaged by incessant interference from multiple visitors, but individuals have precious little agency. Most of the time, those travelers have so little in common with those upon whom they encroach that they have no chance of making any significant modifications, and usually are so far out of the contemporary frame of reference that even the most blatant attention addicts are ignored as obvious glitches in one’s mental outlook.

(Try an experiment. Take your preferred mode of cheap and effective time travel, stock it with your favorite drugs and your favorite 400-pound Harkun attorney, and go 1000 years. Back or forward, doesn’t matter. Either way, when you get to your destination, strike up a conversation with the first individual you encounter [carbon, silicon, or bromine: doesn’t matter]. Let’s suppose you reach someone who communicates in a similar manner, and doesn’t need elaborate mechanical or chemical aids to meet minds with you. Spoken communication is mostly out: 1000 years of language modification and elaboration guarantees that pronunciation would make you mutually unintelligible, much less understanding of common metaphors, slang, or easy similes that would take days to explain to someone with a thousand-year comprehension gap. Forget quick transmission of data, too, especially when anything other than speech would be wildly obsolete. Now try to impart a concept that requires a certain amount of background knowledge, and remember that you’re talking to the first individual you came across, not a specialist in linguistics or chemistry or ancient history. Could YOU get across technological or political or social concepts in the few minutes before that individual reaches out to the local authorities, and could you explain to them that you’re just a visitor and not a potential threat? Again, 1000 years forward or back, it doesn’t matter, and then imagine the gap at 3000 years, 20,000 years, and 5 million.)

The larger concern from extensive time travel from multiple species in Earth’s history lies with verification. Even with impeccable documentation and validation, on a long enough timeline, errors creep in from translation and transcription, changes in storage methods, and from the transcribers’ own biases, no matter the efforts to minimize all of these. Again, this is as much of a problem forward as backward: some of the more entertaining misdescriptions of events by visitors from the distant past was due to a lack of context, and those misdescriptions were repeatedly copied and recopied because they could not be verified by others. Some histories were so hilariously mispresented that they became standards for students for centuries: “Oh, dear. You actually thought Snellings was valid, didn’t you?” Still others, from chroniclers sick and tired of being quoted without attribution, added certain very deliberate falsehoods in appropriate places, and then offered keys to help readers who did the work to separate fraud from legitimate weirdness. Various plagiaristic machine learning systems, copying the peat sausage method of information processing and extraction, ran full-tilt into these, with exactly the extruded history-like product one would expect, thereby demonstrating the value of properly trained intelligences to verify legitimate from codswallop.

To make matters even worse, the constant shuttling and tobogganing through Earth’s chronosphere makes historical verification even harder. Whether physical transport, scrying, or precognition, biases and errors in recording affect subsequent chronicles, which tend to be concentrated with age. Was that codex based on current events, or on prognostication or capture of Kirlian echoes. Did the chronicler actually see the event in question, or was it a classic case of temporal lensing via migraine haloes? More than one chronicle consisted of whole chapters accessed by the aforementioned haloes, directly reading from subsequently debunked and debased future recreations and subsequently used by scholars to verify other chronicles. Twentieth Century entertainment was especially susceptible to temporal lensing, thus helping to explain the Greenland Norse edda about the exploits of Irate Ian.

With that in mind, this is a reminder that without eternal vigilance, the Annals of St. Remedius Medical College could face similar issues in the distant future, especially involving copies of the archives transported to the distant past. Gentle aging is good for cheese and Scotch, but not necessary for historical records.

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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