St. Remedius Medical College: “Realty Sic Transit”

More Vagaries About Downtown Dallas, More Insufficient Answers

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

Four decades ago, the city of Dallas, Texas faced its largest potential extinction event yet. With the exception of the initial Harkun invasion and the last femtoseconds of the Quantum War, no event threatened Dallas more than when the greater Texas petrochemical industry, horribly overextended due to speculation and delusions of grandeur, collapsed in early 1986. The effects of the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate dropping from over $100 a barrel to less than $10 didn’t really kick in until the last few months of the year, but when it did, the devastation to the downtown area was swift and terrible.

The greatest strikes were to downtown real estate, where close to two decades of overexpansion ended when banks stopped giving loans and started foreclosing on them, often killing the banks in the process. The reason the Harkun invasion caused relatively little damage was that most of the property hit in the first few minutes had already been abandoned because nobody knew who actually owned it any more: one bank would purchase a failing bank’s loan portfolio and property register, default on the purchase when its own loans backed with oil deed collateral turned back into pumpkins and mice, and it would be purchased by a third bank shoveling up assets, and so the cycle continued. The pain spread out further into a series of bank runs through 1987 and 1988, with the only people in Dallas unaffected being those with nothing left to lose. Renters of all sorts, both residential and commercial, had no idea to whom they were supposed to submit rent checks from day to day, and the reckoning against property managers taking advantage of the chaos when things started to stabilize in early 1989 was also swift and terrible.

In many cases, until the beginning of the Twenty-First Century Gregorian, so many of the great edifices of downtown Dallas were little more than shells, having been cleared out during the Great Oil Bust, locked up, and allowed to collect dust. The famed Reunion Tower stood among ghosts, many freshly finished and polished just in time for the bust. Many of the taller ones had their front entrances boarded up, with enough of a gap in the boards to show long-mummified ficus trees in the lobby, with all sorts of rumors as to what else was sealed in when the last custodians locked the doors. Some told tales of local punks squatting in high-rises that still required power and water to keep the insides stable. Others told stories about accessing some of those monoliths via the Dallas Underground. Just about every Radio/Television/Film grad in North Texas in the 1990s had stories about going to a presumably abandoned skyscraper, taking a cargo elevator to a particular floor, and reporting to a movie or TV set built in office spaces otherwise untouched since the crash. (Contrary to popular legend, not all of these sets were for locally-produced snuff films for Highland Park necrophilia patrons.) Even after many were converted into apartments and hotel rooms after the turn of the century, the stories persisted of the ghosts of long-dead janitors left in filled-in basements, of strange artifacts and sigils left in penthouse spaces until after the individuals who commissioned them were safely and permanently dead, and of abandoned technologies just waiting to be reactivated with new tenants.

Of those, the last was the closest to reality, and St. Remedius Medical College was the inadvertent instigator. In the late 1960s, one of the College’s greatest developments was perfecting and releasing details on a new zero-point energy generator small enough to make individual skyscrapers energy-independent, and sold the patents and general intellectual property to multiple architectural firms wanting to make their latest buildings autonomous. Everything from outdoor lighting to sewage treatment was self-contained and maintained thanks to the zero-point generator, and the first generation of new Dallas skyscrapers in the 1970s went even further. Completely sealed from the outside and using a combination of electric air scrubbers and carefully selected lobby plants, they seemed less places of business and more spacecraft waiting for the ignition switch to propel them into the vast gulfs between stars.

As it turned out, that was the plan. So many of Dallas’s abandoned highrises had an additional generator in the base, with extremely sophisticated null-gravity generators obtained from unknown sources, that if/when the building was threatened by nuclear attack/race riot/arriving FBI and Interpol agents, the entire apparatus could achieve escape velocity within seconds. Most of these, or at least the command centers, were later stripped out when the building’s owners switched repeatedly in the 1980s, but some remained, inert and impotent, until the buildings were demolished in future centuries. Still others, as discovered during the end of the Quantum War, were still fully active, and used both for escape and for attack in the War’s final seconds. As several chroniclers noted when investigating the causes and aftermaths of the War, “Anybody can throw an asteroid at an enemy, but throwing a building? That’s a level of weirdness nobody was expecting, and that’s what saved us.”

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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