St. Remedius Medical College: "Faust's Personal Librarian"
There are libraries, and then there is The Library
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
At the time of St. Remedius Medical College’s disappearance, the world at the time had libraries. Huge libraries. Extensive libraries. Libraries that gave bibliophiles earworms that ran until they died. Scientific libraries, and thaumaturgic libraries, and psychotropic libraries, and chemical libraries. Many were public, most had a clear definition between open and restricted collections, and even the most restricted and secretive had access to approved visitors.
And then there was The Library.
The Library was the greatest open secret in the whole continuum. It was the perfect collection of Everything Dale Ain’t Never Heered Of in physical form, and more besides. Residing at the metaphorical center of reality, The Library was less a place than a series of interconnected quantum pockets inverted into Klein bottles, constantly sliding by and into and around each other. A aggregation of impossibilities according to all known mathematics, spreading out toward infinity, containing…what?
The Library was old when the Vuun, Earth’s first indigenous intelligent species, first accessed it during the Vendian Period. It was known to the Vuun, and all of the sentient species on Earth during the Cretaceous, and to the species that postdated humanity and its relations until our planet’s sun disappeared and the planets formerly orbiting it went hurtling into the void, and on and on well past that. The Library is also accessible in many, possibly most, of the quantum pockets currently known to bear intelligent forms, as well as to quantum and probability surfers with no fixed status. Only intelligent forms may enter and only intelligent forms may leave, but whether that intelligence is contained in carbon, silicon, cyberspace, cloud entanglement, plasma iridescence, or zero-point storage, all are welcome…to an extent.
Reaching The Library is relatively straightforward. Access to a particular entry is encoded in multiple places in the universe, including the mean distance of Earth from the sun at perihelion, the emerald in the scepter of the Denisovian Republic’s prime minister, and in ciphers left on a dozen worlds. Several access points may be gleaned with the use of dwarf planet astrology, where a conjunction between Ceres, Eris, and Makemake reveals the gateway for a moment every 251 years. Surprisingly, while the information is not included in the number pi, it regularly shows up in supposed random number generators, and one gateway access coordinate was hidden in the last four hands of a televised poker tournament in 1996. Most importantly, someone or something encoded several access point locales in the genome of the plant known as the titan arum, and may only be gathered from distilling and concentrating essence from a fresh bloom and then snorting forcefully.
Knowing about an access point is only the first stage of eventual enlightenment. Some exist as portals locked to a particular place or time, while others emerge from nothingness for a day or a microsecond. Some are synchronized with pulsar bursts or cephid variable star eruptions, with one famed one timed to the appearance in Earth’s skies of the binary star system Algol. Others require specific passwords, or mental images, or the exactly correct sandwich with the exactly correct ingredients. Should time, space, intent, or condiments all agree with The Library’s conditions, the individual steps through to…elsewhere.
The Library, like a certain fictional city, exists in all times and spaces, and innumerable entities may access the same sections at the same time without worrying about silly concepts such as causality, inertia, or displacement. The same individual may exist next to itself from slightly up or down the timestream without the usual messiness, as can individuals with millions or billions of years between each others’ lives outside The Library. In some cases, individuals carrying multiple personalities or essences may have one or more enter while the others remain behind, and entities or forces attempting to piggyback their way into The Library through the body, mind, or aura of another are forcefully and sometimes permanently repelled. Visit ten times, fifty times, a thousand times, and The Library always presents itself the same way, at the same time, and with no chance of meeting oneself or anyone else.
No matter how one enters, the entrance is the same: a vestibule opening out onto a massive library in attune with one’s species’ perceived standard for what constitutes a “library”: if the individual is of a form that has never before visited, The Library will create a new vestibule for them. For most humans, that view is of shelves of books, tablets, scrolls, codices, palimpsests, paintings, sculptures, and visual readouts, seemingly stretching to the horizon and in fact going much, much further. The Library is not the sum repository of all human knowledge, but it comes close, with millions of volumes and assemblages spanning the species’ entire lifespan. The trick isn’t with finding what a visitor is looking for, but in using what they find.
Because of the volume of nearly infinite four-dimensional space, anything comparable to a card catalog or a directory is nearly useless without a way to get to the information gleaned. The vestibule is the source for all travels within the library: queries for specific subjects or vague recollections are shared with one of multiple interfaces (only recently adapted for interpretive dance, judo, and primal screams), and the whole of that pocket of The Library flexes and warps in four-D space-time to bring the visitor to the precise location, thus saving years or decades of travel time. When the visitor completes their research, a simple request of “Return, please” or the equivalent brings them back to the vestibule. Thus, it’s possible to make hundreds of trips back and forth in a typical day without actually taking more than a few steps on and off the vestibule.
Once an individual enters The Library, all information is free. However, copying, translating, or interpreting cost, and the currency is more information. The same goes for food, water, and sleeping accommodations: bring in information that The Library does not currently possess, and facilities and services become available based on the perceived value. The value assigned by The Library may not match the value assigned by others, particularly those offering the information. This fuels a hearty business among time travelers of stealing books, video, and other information moments before the last known example was scheduled to be destroyed, including much hilarity with travelers discovering that purloined Library of Alexandria scrolls or Mayan bark codices had, in fact, been in The Library for centuries. Equally valuable are works that bridge existing volumes or fill important historical gaps: one individual came in with a hand-written guide to the Irate Ian films and received essentially unlimited credit.
Under this system, The Library limits access to the sections corresponding to an individual’s origins, but it is possible, with enough credit, to gain access to other sections, such as those comprising the knowledge of prehuman and posthuman Earth denizens. However, many are inaccessible without prior knowledge (simply asking for information on the Cretaceous civilization known as the Rikkidul is impossible without knowing the name “Rikkidul,” and various forces have built up their own credit to keep that information from easy access), so gaining access is as much of a detective game as it would be outside The Library. And with some, the knowledge therein is just too dangerous to share with other species, such as the joke archives of the Chukchuk.
One last aspect is that The Library may at times choose a guardian and organizer for each section, based on their passion for knowledge and their dedication to the precepts of The Library’s purpose and function. That Librarian, and the word is always capitalized or otherwise emphasized to inform others of the gravity of the responsibility, is the one person at any given time to have full access to the complete Library, and may come and go within and without the quantum pocket at will. Even The Library cannot stop the forces of entropy (most of The Library’s functions at any given time are dedicated to making exact copies of existing materials to replace, sometimes preemptively, those damaged or overly worn by accident), and when a Librarian dies, its mortal remnants are encased in a form of synthetic amber and usually moved to a place of honor by the vestibule. Who performs this activity is completely unknown, and may be an automatic Library function, as others who die within, for whatever reason, are deposited outside their arrival entrance. Occasionally, Librarians are found preserved at their place of death: the reason why this happens is unknown, but some legends hold that the Librarian may choose, and many choose to stay as close to their particular research as possible. Attempting to injure, kill, or coerce a Librarian has almost the same overwhelming response as knowingly damaging or destroying Library contents, and individuals foolish or nihilistic enough to do so rarely leave remains to be identified, if at all.
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.