St. Remedius Medical College: "Funny, Hysterical, and Prolapse-Inducing Car Races"
St. Remedius Student Auto Races and Other Stress-Busters
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
With the popular presentation of St. Remedius Medical College as a protector of the continuum and its contents, many forget that the last word in its title applied all year round. While many of its students went on to become valued faculty, agents, and associates in its never-ending investigations and interventions, they only stood a chance of getting there after finishing a punishing study regimen and repeated opportunities to prove their grasp of the knowledge gained from four, eight, or 20 years (a standard timespan for the St. Remedius Temporal Science undergraduate program) in what many graduates declare as “making studying physics at Caltech look like the summer vacation after high school.”
With such intensity comes a need for stress relief, as well as tradition. The best example is of Caltech’s famed Ditch Day, famed for a an all-day orgy of applied psychology and extreme violence. Texas universities and colleges have their own rituals with just as much meaning as Ditch Day, especially in autumn when the summer heat finally breaks. Southern Methodist University’s sorting of freshman business and marketing majors into the four Houses “Pinworm,” “Botfly,” “Cordyceps,” and “Candiru,” are matched by comparable competitions of seniors at University of Texas at Austin of such hardhitting esoterica as “How do you spell ‘UT’?”, “Is This Going To Be On the Test?”, and “Does This Smell Like Urine To You?” Not to be outdone, Texas A&M has its famed “Who’s Laughing Now, Jack?” contest, involving cash prizes and lasting fame for the invention or technique that causes the biggest losses to UT-Austin’s endowments. (Last year’s winner slammed UT’s law school, its legacy enrollment program, and its Greek Life all at once with a low-fat cure for fetal alcohol syndrome.) By mid-October, when most Texas schools focus on driving to Dallas for a double bill of football games and hot-and-cold running beer vomit in the streets, St. Remedius offered an alternative: the I-20 Road Rage.
St. Remedius had a few traditional American college standards: the St. Remedius Hodags were a football team better known for their official logo being designed by the artist Ralph Steadman than for their prowess on the field, but they made up for that deficit with friendly Weiner Dog Winternational races between the Texas A&M mascot “Reveille” and St. Remedius mascot “Sparky.” Its fencing team regularly provided Olympic contenders in foil, saber, and Claymore, and the annual faculty Battle of the Bands with MIT and Stanford turned into routs for obvious reasons. What really motivated students, alumni, faculty, and journalist was the annual October road race, with some of the strangest vehicles ever to hit asphalt designed by some of the most iconoclastic students ever to hit the American educational system.
The basic rules were simple. Each department at St. Remedius, from English to Music to Psionics, designed, built, and submitted a vehicle for consideration. The vehicles may be powered by any means necessary, from lithium-fusion ramjets to necromantic levitation to exotropic repulsors to geomantic surfing, but they or their main propulsion field may not leave contact with the road surface for more than 15 seconds or be disqualified. Each vehicle must move through traditional three-dimensional space-time for the entire duration, a 100-mile (160.93 km) tear across Interstate Highway 20 from the town of Forney to the top of the Edwards Plateau and back. Each vehicle has a driver and backup, with the backup using whatever nonlethal countermeasures may be necessary to slow or stop competing vehicles, from missiles to sandcasters to tripwebs. Other than that and an absolute disqualifying requirement not to go off the course and into bystander neighborhoods, there are no other rules.
Traditionally, the Saturday of the race was crisp and clear, with warm sunny temperatures and low humidity. Mockingbirds called at dawn, and the last grasshoppers and crickets of the season buzzed and chirped. The whole world went quiet as the sun rose above the horizon…until the moment the start signal hit and anywhere between 20 and 40 transcendentally overpowered cars, utilizing the latest theories and concepts in engineering, physics, and magic jumped forward, pushing the limits of the Doppler effect in sound and sometimes in light. Most street-legal vehicles could finish the race in two hours: the current record, set in 1982, is 17 minutes, but most Road Rages lasted about an hour. Spectators lined the entire route, but not too close to the road: the air displacement at those speeds, especially when hitting the standard south wind coming off the Gulf of Mexico, could tear apart road signs, non-augmented vehicles, and rubberneckers alike.
The lists of competitors and winners since the I020 Road Rage started in 1965, the plans for the vehicles, and most audio and video of the actual events, were all lost with the event that removed the whole of the St. Remedius campus from our reality. That said, the last race featured a photo-finish between the car entered by an all-woman Engineering team, the Baroness (all-electric, electrostatic recharging while on the road, neuropollen guns) and the Music department’s entry “The Doof” (guitar-induced cavitation fusion, shockwave promulgators, subharmonic impact shields) so close that the teams swore at that moment that they wanted a rematch that next spring just to confirm the best driver. Tickets for grandstand seating at the turnpoint will be on sale soon.
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.