St. Remedius Medical College: "Let's Kill the Time Lord Again"
So what happens when two parties for time travelers happen at the same time? Well, one gets neglected.
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
June 28, 2009. This was the day famed physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travelers and then sent out invitations after it was done, using the lack of visitors as evidence, not proof but evidence, that time travel was not possible. After the event, quite a bit of speculation both among fellow physicists and the general public ranged as for the reasons why no visitors arrived at Dr. Hawking’s party. Was it that time travel didn’t exist, that temporal visitors had no interest, or that visitors to that chronosphere had no interest in being photographed, examined, and interrogated?
The reality was that June 28, 2009 was an especially inauspicious date for a time traveler party. Firstly, it was on a Sunday. Secondly, invisible to the temporally inflexible, the timestreams around that date were severely roiled and agitated, making anyone trying to reach the University of Cambridge at that time at risk of being lost or chronally shattered as they attempted to synch up with the party location and sequence. Thirdly, the reason why the timestreams were roiled and agitated was that one of the great Time Traveler Balls happened the night before on the campus of St. Remedius Medical College in Dallas, Texas, and the timestreams on all sides of June 27 were a menace for a week in all time directions. It was THAT wild a party.
To be fair, Hawking’s party never could have attracted time travelers anyway, and not just because champagne was so gauche after the 22nd Century. (The horrible terrorist act melding Chardonnay grapes with Cordyceps fungus tailored for humans pretty much destroyed demand for wine on Earth, as well as ruining sales of curry chicken salad by association, for at least a millennium.) The snacks were also anything that any dedicated traveler could snag with a few replicated pound Sterling notes, and why risk setting off a chronal recursion solely for Hula Hoops or Jaffa cakes? Most importantly, as tempting as Hawking’s invitation may have been to the few temporal pranksters who recognized the name, it was still the equivalent of a Facebook event invitation: easy to send and just as easy to forget. St. Remedius Time Traveler Ball invitations weren’t only put directly in the path of the most interesting travelers, but they were absolute works of art on their own, cast in the finest crystal and laser-etched internally to minimize counterfeiting, and any discarded or ignored were avidly snapped up by other visitors and put to good use. Again, it was THAT wild a party.
On the night of June 28, 2009, the St. Remedius parking lot “A” simply exploded with light and sound as invitees materialized, deintegrated, and mobsessed from all over space-time. The invitations made no specification that the party was solely for humans, which meant that visitors from the Larkash of Cretaceous North America, the Vuuun of Vendian Australia, and the Kilok of post-Anthropocene Antarctica got to rub shoulders and other body/limb junctions with such famed human chronal explorers as Emily Hogan, Elva Corrisone, and the Assemblage of Kurrun. The party wasn’t limited to Earth residents, either, which is why The Great Archeologists of the Andromeda 3 galaxy, sifting through the remnants of the Milky Way some five billion years ahead of the present time, came, saw, and became extremely intoxicated. The parking lot became a time vehicle car show, with designs and technologies working on at least three dozen time theories and metaphors, including an example of the previously-rumored webships of the Wolfram Tor, from 30 million light years and 3.6 million years before present, next to a home-made chronobox driven by Miss Christine Ketterley of 1890s London. The enigmatic head of the St. Remedius Advanced Technologies department, only known as “Bennett,” hauled out his famed Silver Machine for perusal and discussion, and the space between it and the webship filled with capsules, boxes, Klein bottles, timeriggers, sail-runners, warpflowers, and craft for which human analogies rapidly fell apart.
As for the party inside, security was extremely tight, if only because of grad students desperately craving conversation and/or free food, but the invitees who arrived via the parking lot found themselves crowded by travelers with no need for primitive time control apparatus, who showed up as soon as the doors opened. The food, drink, aerosols, and phonemes available were top-notch, and included surprises brought by the guests, including song-sand from XXVII Collective and the last produced can of Josta. The entertainment was similarly appropriate, with talent coming from the St. Remedius affiliate the Roy Orbison Celebrity Rehab Clinic and Retreat, established in a quantum pocket outside the bustling town of Sheepdip, Wyoming. Where else could anyone catch a barbershop quartet of Jimi Hendrix, Joey Ramone, Wendy O. Williams, and Andy Gibb before seeing the only time in the universe where Bianca Halstead and Dave Brockie sang a duet of the classic “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”? Even the Larkash representatives were impressed.
As for Hawking’s party the next day, the real irony was that many of the attendees at St. Remedius sent regret notes to Hawking, along with the occasional bit of currency from up and down the timestream (and a few delightfully retro signed glossy head shots, mostly from the XXVII Collective). However, due to a coordinate mixup, the notes were all delivered to time 2009, but to the space where Cambridge would be in the late Devonian. The few pieces that survived plate tectonics, metamorphism, and erosion were unearthed in 1612 and used as kindling that winter. And so it goes, as a famous traveler who definitely didn’t miss the St. Remedius party would say.
Essential Reading
Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded by Jason Heller (Melville House, 2018)
Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard by Mark Finn (The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2006)
Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle (Harcourt, 2006)
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.