St. Remedius Medical College: "Giving Whole New Meaning to 'Bleedthrough'"
It's not the danger of one experiment, but of a lot of them...
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
One of the understated problems with exonormal research was that sometimes the experiments continued long after the lab closed for the day or for the duration. Biological, mechanical, and theological contamination were bad enough, but the energies accessed to stimulate them sometimes echoed at barely detectable but still effective levels. Even with strict decontamination, grounding, and exorcism protocols, enough cumulative effects linger, sometimes decades later, that one focus or multiple stimuli combine in unexpected ways. This became drastically important at St. Remedius Medical College by the late 1970s, with a combination of a routine X-raying of an Egyptian mummy, a gamma ray cascade from an accumulation of particularly pure pitchblende, the washing of an excavated memory replicator from the city buried in the remnants of Mount Briscoe in Pennsylvanian West Texas, and cataloguing of a donated Von Neumann biochip weapons platform from the 32nd Century combined in a catastrophic manner, almost leading to the first reign of the self-declared Cyborg Queen Tothmea in downtown Dallas. The actions and negotiations leading to her standing down and not conquering the whole of North America are another story for another time, but it became obvious to researchers, administrators, and publicists alike that the current efforts to prevent cross-contamination were inadequate.
An interim solution presented itself as St. Remedius expanded its power and sensory webs, which coincided with the massive overexpansion of office and retail spaces in the Dallas area during the early 1980s oil boom. With developers loaded with speculator cash assuming that “build it and they will come” was a suitable business plan, the greater Dallas/Fort Worth area found itself buried in extravagant, impractical, and sometimes nearly impossible-to-rent office and retail spaces when the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate Crude dropped in 1986 to ten percent of its previous value. While this led to a massive crash in the real estate market, as innumerable speculators watched their fortunes turn back into pumpkins and mice, the empty high-rises, shopping malls, and industrial parks, as well as the foundations for incomplete endeavors, became test beds for a distributed system of laboratories and control facilities, leading to a golden age of research within St. Remedius that continued to the day of its disappearance.
At first, the new program made everyone happy. Researchers had work areas reasonably clean of prior interference, especially with office buildings that sat empty for years after officially opening. Property managers were thrilled to rent out floors and finished offices for better rates than offered by the various TV and movie producers needing cheap shooting locations, and with much less mess left behind when finished. In fact, St. Remedius became a preferred tenant for many managers, as usually rent and deposits were paid without months of remittance invoices, and its crews often left decided improvements to break areas, plumbing, and elevators. Best of all, the restaurants and shops around a St. Remedius project were thrilled with both the quality of customer and the shop talk, especially compared to the usual commercial developers and hedge fund execs.
St. Remedius also made essential improvements in locations where the oil bust stopped development due to the original builder hopping on last-minute flights to countries without extradition treaties with the United States. A large industrial park planned for the southwest corner of the intersection between Interstate Highway 35 and Lyndon Baines Johnson Freeway was planned for 1986 but only completed in 1999, but it acted in the interim as the locale for a graviton detector array between 1987 and 1997. Various unfinished excavations through the Dallas area, only producing mosquitoes as the owners fought over who was responsible for shoring up siding and clearing brush and trees growing in the pilings, found themselves being visited by St. Remedius agents offering property remediation in exchanged for decreased rent. The owners rarely asked what was being done with the property, but were always thrilled with improved power and fiber cable networks after the crews were finished.
The repercussions, though, only became obvious much later, because of the same echoes that disrupted so many on-campus labs. St. Remedius teams always left the rented floors and facilities impeccably clean, but occasionally…traces remained. Strange noises after hours. Noises from what everyone nervously described as mice or cockroaches, but with patterns never heard from either and sometimes sounding like code. Shadowy figures wandering halls as employees of new companies entered for the day. Executives arriving to fresh pots of coffee in their offices without significant amounts of urine, proving that nothing human, or at least none of their employees, had made them. Some subsequent tenants had issues with the echoes, but so long as the rents stayed reasonable, they were told by their managers to power through.
The real danger, though, came when other exonormal agents attempted to document or utilize those echoes, either in the hopes of getting a lead on St. Remedius research or getting ahead on applicable patents and journal papers. Only a few today talk about the wave of demolished and refurbished shopping malls in Dallas in the late 1990s, long before the current extinction event, except for recollections of the Prestonwood Mall in Addison. There, urban spelunkers in 1999 set off a decommissioned time corridor leading to the mall in June 1980, causing them to assume that their much-anticipated zombie apocalypse was ahead of schedule and setting off a short-lived panic. Stories of the now-deceased necromancers trying to reverse-engineer a St. Remedius experiment in the dying Valley View Center mall in 2016, leading to the mall’s eventual emptying and demolition, are still just anecdote, but people passing by the now-razed site report globes of light and occasional cries in the middle of night, with most disagreeing as to the cries being of terror or delight.
Today, most of the more popular office buildings with St. Remedius connections report little in the way of anomalies, but one on LBJ Freeway, long promoted for musician-friendly practice spaces, was recently razed. Rumors that the building was used by the St. Remedius music department, and that the experiments therein are the basis behind a new series of previously unknown Ramones videos recently uploaded to YouTube, remain just rumors.
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.