St. Remedius Medical College: "Death By Cute"
Pikas and Quantum Pockets
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
In the centuries since the earliest monks of the Order of St. Remedius started logging the locations and properties of what we now refer to as quantum pockets, the understanding of what we know about how these pockets interact with each other only started after the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Look at our universe and its associated pockets as a warm and luxurious bubble bath with one massive bubble in the center. Surrounding it and suffusing it is the so-called quantum foam, with new bubbles spontaneously emerging and popping. Some bubbles merge, bringing the contents into sharp contact, while new bubbles form inside of others and separate those contents. Now, picture those bubbles having the ability to connect edges with others on the other side of the tub, with different rates of time running in different bubbles, and gaps opening in the membranes between bubbles for microseconds at without causing one to collapse into another…and consider the bacteria and viruses captured in each bubble and how they would react to, say, a population from the other side of the tub that had been separated from each other for subjectively millions or billions of years.
Under most circumstances, rarely would experts in quantum physics and evolutionary theory meet in common ground outside of a bar or coffee shop, or at in front of the 24-hour soup bar at Siouzi’s Coffee located within a quick walk from the St. Remedius Medical College campus, but that was before a spate of disappearances of American tourists in a patch of the Canadian Rockies near the city of Banff, Alberta. After extensive exploration that also led to the deaths of three postgrads, the vagaries of the quantum foam intersected with punctuated equilibrium in the most unexpected form of…the pika.
Official descriptions of pikas note that some 37 extant species exist, with two previously known species in North America. St. Remedius investigations led to the description of 2814 new species separated from our world only by the thinnest of quantum membranes, with potentially thousands in currently inaccessible quantum pockets. Of those new species, at least 800 are considered dangerous to humans, with 72 listed as “Code Blue,” which justifies nuclear and extra-nuclear options in preventing them from becoming established in our continuum. Of those, eighteen are listed as “terminally infectious.” These are just the species found so far: some quantum pockets were so incredibly dangerous to contemporary life that nuclear sterilization is a seriously contemplated option should these pockets ever reopen. Unfortunately, not only could they reopen, but they might instead open onto other pockets and make things worse.
The situation started approximately 50,000 years before the current time, when the American pika, Ochotona princeps, ranged above the treelines in the Rocky Mountains. Normally, the pika is a much-beloved small herbivorous mammal known both for its piercing calls and for it incessantly gathering flowering plants and grasses in “haypile” reserves in which it lives over the long winter. Although commonly mistaken for rodents, pikas are actually members of the Order Lagomorpha, which include rabbits and hares. For the most part, American pikas are restricted to cold climate, being unable to handle temperatures above 80 degrees F (26.66 degrees C), with ongoing climate change threatening to shrink their range further. At that time, as a new glaciation period was starting to expand Earth’s ice caps, one quantum pocket opened up near the present location of the town of Canmore, with a number of pikas and local vegetation finding their way inside before closing. And then things got weird.
Many quantum pockets are shadows of our main continuum: aside from having much smaller areas, they appear to be separate worlds, with distinct atmospheres, land areas, and even astronomical features such as suns and moons. Some may contain nothing but atmosphere, while others are nothing but lithosphere. Such aspects as ambient radiation, gravity, and even time can range wildly between pockets, much to the shock of anyone or anything moving between pockets. The early quantum pikas entered a pocket already loaded with grasses and lupines, but free of trees, birds, or predators of any sort. Removed from previous limitations imposed by predation or temperature gradients, the pikas went forth and multiplied, gradually evolving into a wide range of forms to fill mountain and prairie biomes. For a while, the pikas of Pocket 2118 demonstrated a variety comparable to the cichlids of Lake Tanganyika, with carnivory re-evolving multiple times and causing even more evolutionary variation. For a time, a wide mammalian ecosystem ranged across the pocket, with carnivores and herbivores, browsers and scavengers, hunters and even fliers, all derived from the original pika stock, Then this pocket opened to other pockets, with more pikas moving into them and eventually adapting to new conditions therein.
At this point, peripatric speciation kicked in due to the diverse conditions. In one pocket with no source of outside radiation and extensive volcanic fumaroles, blind albino pikas munched sulfur to feed colonies of intestinal bacteria that converted that sulfur into energy. In others, variations in gravity produced hoppers and crawlers, while still other pockets produced pikas that floated via gigantic cheek pouches full of naturally derived hydrogen. Inevitably, as happened in our continuum over and over, many of these pikas took up a life of parasitism on other forms. Those not only wreaked havoc across their own pockets, but made things much more interesting for other pockets’ biota when they were able to cross over. Sometimes two or more pockets would merge at once, throwing wildly diverse environments and ecosystems together, and then offshoots of those colonized other pockets, uninhabited or otherwise. Not only did this cosmic game of Musical Chairs lead to a truly impressive variety of species, but with the inclusion of pockets where subjective time ran faster or slower, 50,000 years of evolution could turn into millions. And the pikas kept breeding.
By the first incursion back into our continuum, the first pika-colonized pocket was unrecognizable from its original condition. Grasses had evolved in other pockets into trees, hedges, and less categorizable forms, and the original herds of grazing pikas and packs of axe-tooth pikas were long extinct. The first explorers from St. Remedius quickly discovered the missing tourists that started the investigation in the first place, and shortly afterward the parasites of Pocket 2118 found them.
As survivors agreed later, pikas that grabbed and immobilized humans before implanting larvae that burst out of the unfortunate host would have been relatively humane compared to what actually happened. Some species merely paralyzed hosts with venomous saliva, dragged them to carefully constructed burrows, placed a newly hatched piklet atop the body, and sealed up the burrow to allow the hatchling to consume the body in peace. Others captured multiple hosts, packed them into long burrows, and left a piklet at the end to go through the entire stack. Another jumped onto hosts and left microscopic eggs, which upon hatching would burrow into the flesh and call to each other while feeding before emerging as adults a month later. Others had spurs on their feet that injected eggs, with piklets eventually emerging in felt cocoons on the host’s back, and some left one or two neonate young inside the host’s body, manipulating the host into protecting the remaining emerged piklets until it finally died of exhaustion. Still others had elaborate multi-stage life cycles, including the species that started its cycle by its larvae being taken in through contaminated drinking water, spreading through the bloodstream, attaching to the liver and spleen, and passing new larvae through the host’s feces to infect new waterways, or the species that quietly grew in the host’s intestines and then climbed out the host’s anus when mature.
The absolute worst encounter, though, was with a pika that went past convergent evolution with insects and nematodes and paralleled fungus. This species superficially resembled a colony of pikas. Each individual, though, was connected to a central mass via a barely visible mycelium, and any predator or investigator grasping one was immediately overwhelmed by more hyphae penetrating the skin and immediately spreading through the flesh. Over the next six hours or so, the victim was digested from within before the empty sack of skin, hair, and clothing was gently shoved out of range. The stage of digestion and absorption could be determined by the chirps emitted by the other extensions, and after digesting enough prey, the central mass produced a massive fruiting body that spread spores on the wind to start new colonies. The only natural predator was a gigantic flying pika that dove onto the rock concealing the central mass, flipped it over, and gorged itself on the otherwise unprotected thallus. Because of this, and the ease in which spores can be trapped by fabric or hair, any investigators who stray near a colony have to abandon all clothing and shave their heads, and one unplanned incursion is why Canadian authorities do not talk about the disappearance of the town of Seebe in 2010.
In years of investigation of hundreds of quantum, one thing has never turned up so far: a pika derivative showing signs of sentience. This keeps whole departments at St. Remedius awake at night, especially if one of the parasites should develop enough intelligence to utilize human technology. This is not the only reason why unlicensed nuclear weapons were installed atop Mount Rundle and Grotto Mountain and set with deadman switches if they do not receive a daily satellite signal, but it helps, especially if the hypothetical intelligent pikas are too cute to resist.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. 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. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.