While normally associated with the military, St. Remedius Medical College researchers, professors, and students all have their own particular ID “dog tags” for identifying individuals or parts thereof, depending upon their particular responsibilities. Besides official picture ID used for everything from applying for classes to accessing bicycle and motorcycle parking spots, most departments also use their own separate medallions depending upon their particular fields of study. Applied Metaphysics, for instance, uses talismans with specific spell repulsion to minimize compulsion and possession, and Psionics uses engram-embossed medals complete with mnemonic couplet “cheat sheets” on the back for mind-clearing and mental scan resistance. Most researchers of lab assistant level, though, come with the default St. Remedius titanium dog tag, containing a map of known pulsars in the universe, a schematic of the appearance of the solar system, a basic map of Earth’s surface, and a legend in binary notation to translate the notations to most known measurements. (This is in addition to their giving an automatic 20 percent discount at Siouxsi’s Coffee, a campus-famed coffee and vegan pastry shop located near the Paleontology Hall.) This wasn’t the only used identification and tracking system, and a standard system only went into effect in the mid-1980s.
Before then, St. Remedius members attempted multiple methods to allow identification of the dead and rehabilitation of those who lived. From the earliest days of the order, religious medals of the saint came in very handy when coming across picked skeletons or blasted ashes, but these had issues, especially involving temperatures likely to melt silver. In addition, when multiple medals were found together, discerning which members of an expedition required rescue and which only needed Last Rites depended upon personalization of each medal, which may or may not have been recorded elsewhere. In addition, certain competitors and enemies of the order made collecting medals a hobby, and others simply looked at the monetary value of silver or gold medals and melted them down shortly after finding them. By 1705, St. Remedius medals and their chains were made of bronze, with the name and ranking of the wearer engraved on the back. (The bronze regularly stained the skin of the wearer, leading to multiple initiation rituals to welcome new “green-necks” that continued to St. Remedius’s last day.) As good as they were, though, researchers needed more, with various ways to include additional information, usually in the forms of tiny scrolls, continuing into the 20th Century. Increased contact with other entities through space and time made these obsolete, especially in the hope the medallion and/or its wearer being returned complete and with minimal permanent scarring.
An early precursor to the final St. Remedius tag appeared in civilian use as the “Galactitag,” featuring a modified map of Earth’s location from the plaque installed on the Pioneer 10 and 11 interplanetary probes launched in the 1970s. Although the concept of the Galactitag was mocked as “inspired, silly, & useless” by the New York Times in 1987, the problem wasn’t that the likelihood of it being located and translated by a non-human or post-human intelligence was poor. Rather, the pulsar map on the Pioneer plaque was the main flaw, as they moved quickly enough, on a cosmic timescale, that the map was obsolete shortly after it was created. This made the map useless for locating a cosmic castaway’s home in space, but it made it perfect for locating the castaway’s home in time. Measure the current position of the pulsars in the map, extrapolate back to the positions in the map, and the reasonably correct time, within about 5000 years, is now available. At least, that was the idea.
A major inclusion to the dog tags came in the early 21st Century, with the development of 5D memory crystals allowing exponentially greater amounts of information to be added to the tags. Starting in 2020, all issued dog tags included a tiny quartz droplet that could store the wearer’s entire genome, if available, as well as vital information on how to return the dog tag if in case it were found sans its original wearer. As St. Remedius became more and more involved with temporal threats, the incredible stability of memory crystals allowed them to be located, excavated, and accessed, sometimes millions or even billions of years after the wearer returned to dust.
As a point of rule, the map on the front of the dog tag corresponded to the location of the wearer at the time it was issued, and its translatability allowed dozens of spatial and temporal travelers to return to their relative native time and place. Most that overshot returned at a later time, leading to St. Remedius to develop all sorts of policies involving seniority and back pay for anyone investigating the timestream. Some, though, were dropped off before they left, sometimes years before they were born, but St. Remedius had a plan for that as well. Experiments with quantum pockets led to the discovery and co-opting of a pocket outside of the normal timestream, allowing rescued individuals to wait until minutes after their previous selves left and then continue their lives post-event, thereby avoiding temporal paradoxes, issues with alternate identities, and further issues with seniority and back pay. This was so successful that others up and down the timeline with engine trouble in the 20th and 21st Century leased use of the pocket to wait out a rescue that might not happen for millennia or for just the right moment to risk heading back without damaging the subsequent timeline. For reasons only known to top personnel, the pocket is scheduled to open and disgorge all inside on February 30, 10,218 in the old Gregorian calendar. What happens to those regurgitated by the quantum pocket at that date is still uncertain.
One final mystery concerning the dog tags involves their near-indestructibility, as tags have turned up all over space-time, often to the surprise of the individual described on the tag. Left out of a famous paper published in 1928 of a new fossil discovered near the town of Seymour, Texas was the discovery of a cache of 372 metal tags buried, apparently very deliberately, about a meter away from the holotype fossil of the seymouriamorph (a form of tetrapod with both features of amphibians and reptiles) named, appropriately enough, Seymouria by the famed paleontologist Alfred Romer. St. Remedius authorities only discovered the existence of the cache in the 1980s when its own dog tags were under development, and each tag was eventually tracked, thanks to the memory crystals in each one, to an staffer or professor involved with St. Remedius in the 21st Century. What caused these to be left in the Early Permian of Texas, as well as the fate of their original owners, is still a mystery, and one shared with very few of the potential participants.
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.