St. Remedius Medical College: "Junk In the Goldilocks Zone"
The Problems With Tracking Space Junk When It May Not Be Junk
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Space around and near Earth is a crowded place. By most estimates, some 2000 active human satellites orbit the planet, with an additional 3000 defunct ones, and approximately 34,000 pieces of artificial space junk larger than 10 centimeters floating between Earth and its moon. When counting incipient meteors, cometary dust, objects trapped and then released by unstable Lagrange points, rocks thrown into the inner solar system by gravitational interference from Jupiter and Saturn, interstellar detritus, and random zero-point energy outbursts, everyone on Earth today should be thankful for the combination of Earth’s relatively dense atmosphere and its strong magnetic field offering a little bit of protection from items in the Great Beyond.
This, of course, only includes items of known human manufacture. This, of course, only includes items not of a metaphysical nature. This, absolutely certainly cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, does not include items placed in orbit or elsewhere for reasons that would cause severe distress upon the remaining majority of lifeforms on Earth, past and present, that would have to clean up the mess afterward.
As soon as humans were capable of technological spaceflight, they started leaving items announcing their arrival, so nobody should be surprised that the various prehuman technological civilizations developing or colonizing Earth in its past did much the same. Large swaths of the moon are some of the biggest archeological sites in our solar system, both from unique construction and from subsequent excavation and interpretation from the intelligences coming later. Others avoided the moon and went straight to outer bodies of the solar system: the Centaur minor planet 2060 Chiron contains a massive repository of the most important archives of the Cretaceous dinosauroid Chukchuk, and its current ring system is mostly comprised of warnings from multiple sentients warning “This is not a place of honor.” From the craters of Mercury to the furthest outskirts of the Oort Cloud, the challenge of exploring our solar system is in finding locations without some kind of significant sentient trace over the last four billion years, whether cosmic arks of preserved culture or one individual’s equivalent of writing its name in the snow.
Directly within the Earth-Moon system, all sorts of things, both active and long—disabled, orbit silently through the skies, some for an exceedingly long time. One set of drones orbiting since the late Ordovician were placed by an otherwise unknown form to detect and repel the results of a fad for automated planetkiller robots one galaxy over from ours. Others were for dangerous asteroid deflection, or the remnants of space elevators allowing cost-effective lifting of cargos to orbit, or signal mirrors for bouncing laser signals through the inner solar system, or gravitic resonators warning distant travelers of impending solar outbursts. As other sentient species before them discovered for themselves, while many of these were completely inert, many were still functional, some of those were still vital, and even more were put in place to counteract the effect of previous travelers’ well-meaning hubris. Efforts to clean up the Earth-Moon system were always futile, often abandoned, and sometimes impressively explosive.
This situation also applied to human thaumaturgical exploration of the solar system. Before the understanding of such concepts as vacuum, gamma-ray irradiation, and micrometeroid bombardment, many up-and-coming sorcerers attempted to visit the moon and its presumed seas and forests, not realizing until far too late that options for making the moon habitable ended billions of years earlier. The appropriately named book Touch Me Not replicated the rituals for one such transportation, again without sharing the need for air or a way to return, with that ritual copied in multiple forms in books, treatises, and early Usenet postings. The bodies of those who succeeded, or sometimes just their disassociated components, are still regularly encountered on the Oceanus Procellarum, usually to the surprise of cohorts who only knew they stopped attending local renaissance faires.
(Not that this would stopped beings without the need for air. Rumors of a major presence of vampires on the moon, living deep below the surface and cultivating humans and other animals in sealed chambers for food, ranged since the 1600s, but with no conclusive evidence found in recent times. The one potential site on the lunar Farside that compares to the rumors, though, appears to have been annihilated by a 20-megaton thermonuclear explosion, with radioactive traces at the crater site dated to the time of the Apollo 8 moon mission in 1968, so evidence remains inconclusive.)
Not that this stopped sorcerers, astrologers, astermancers, and others dedicated to the magical arts from exploring, colonizing, and modifying everything they could find. Enchanted cometary cores wandering through the solar system gave enough influence to negate or augment astrological effects, removing the effect of the Pleaides from modern zodiac charts among other results. Knowing that monoliths or cairns on Earth allowed others to destroy or modify talismanic effects if they could be reached, many sorcerers trapped and bound beings of infernal or extracosmic origin with henges on asteroids or distant moons, often to the severe inconvenience of xenoarcheologists centuries later. Other constructs were put in orbit to modify the flow of ley lines, disrupt mana flows, and concentrate inflows of pilcachor to more accessible or less accessible locations, depending upon the individual desire or need. Subsequent metaphors for “the stars being right” or “the cosmic spheres” often were magician code for an incredibly complex web of thaumaturgic energies spreading between tiny rocks through the solar system, all coming to a final pattern every 500,000 years. Whether that pattern has reached its maximum now, in the far future, or in the prehuman past is still unknown.
Because of its contents, the unknown location of the St. Remedius Medical College technology and thaumaturgy library of chronicled, archived, and sometimes monetized artifacts, relics, devices, and assemblies after the school’s disappearance still encourages quests by professionals and dedicated amateurs comparable to searching for the Amber Room. What was only discovered recently in St. Remedius archives was the presence of a massive quantum pocket near the L5 Lagrange point, with some reports suggesting that most of the prehuman or sorcerous artifacts in the inner solar system not directly required for smooth operation are instead sequestered inside the pocket. What those artifacts may be, much less how to access the quantum pocket, remains one of the most enduring St. Remedius mysteries to date.
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.