St. Remedius Medical College: "The Triffid That Ate Stoke-on-Trent"
Lemmy may be God, but sometimes even Lemmy needs help from time to time
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Besides the usual shenanigans with the Music department, St. Remedius Medical College has a very long history of involvement and possible interference with musical events. A severe temporal accident helps explain why David Bowie died on March 6, 1936 while fighting to defend the Alamo, while Jim Bowie died in January 2016, two decades after surviving a 30-minute crash course on how to play a custom silver Steinberger GL2 headless guitar before getting onstage to play with Nine Inch Nails in Hartford, Connecticut. Because of this and other events, mostly instigated by other parties refusing to accept that breaking some laws of time are felony offenses, St. Remedius started the Roy Orbison Celebrity Rehab Clinic and Retreat in Sheepdip, Wyoming to remove influential musicians from potential chronal apprehension and blatant kidnapping. Sitting outside the “normal” timestream in a quantum pocket, the Clinic proudly boasts guide and host Elvis Presley organizing activities and events with other members, including small-arms practice with John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, ultralight flying with Buddy Holly and Stevie Ray Vaughan (with Rick Nelson as flight crew and Randy Rhoads in the control tower), charm school classes with Sid Vicious and GG Allin, and managing the world-famous barbershop quartet of Jimi Hendrix, Joey Ramone, Andy Gibb, and Oderus Urungus as they faced the competing all-women quartet of Janis Joplin, Bianca Halstead, Karen Carpenter, and Wendy O. Williams. The darker side lies in a quantum pocket on Pluto’s moon Charon, where the bodies of Michael Jackson and Scott Weiland wait in cryogenic sleep at temperatures below the freezing point of nitrogen for the eventual arrival of Edie Brickell and Phil Collins.
One expected tenant of the Clinic isn’t there except in spirit: famed Hawkwind and Motorhead lead singer and guitarist Lemmy Kilmister lived exactly according to his Wikipedia entry, dying four days after his 70th birthday. (Any posthumous sightings of Lemmy are generally attributed to pranks from Bad News bassist Colin Grigson, who faked his death from a jenkem overdose in 2014.) While the rest of Kilmister was cremated and buried in January 2015, his distinctive facial moles turned out to be very much alive and thriving, with samples taken shortly before his death showing a preternatural ability to survive and reproduce in a wide range of nutrient baths. Combined with a then-new vegetative sterile propagation technique previously used for returning the early seed plant Williamsonia to the wild, the propagated Lemmy tissue proved to be unique: a plant/animal chimera with a particularly productive meristem form allowing pieces to be cut off stem cell material, placed in sterile media, and used to grow hundreds, thousands, or even millions of Lemmys a day.
To this end, while similar meristem treatment proved unattainable for other humans, with one very significant exception, sterile tissue-propagated Lemmys are now a very important tool in the St. Remedius xenobiology program, particularly with First Contact incidents. In cases where sending a complete Lemmy as an ambassador and teaching tool for extraterrestrial contact is impractical, Lemmy fragments, including full instructions on proper germination and care on included St. Remedius dogtags, have been sent to most intelligences within our galaxy and within most satellite galaxies orbiting it. The few civilizations assuming that the Lemmy tissue could be used to develop a cloned slave race and food source always ended in catastrophic failure, and the hope was that Lemmys could act as a baseline for contemporary humans, even if all on Earth were subject to a sudden extinction event. To facilitate this, broadcasts of Lemmy chimera genome and selected playlists were made via radio, gravity wave, and telepulse in all directions through the universe, guaranteeing that even as Earth’s sun expanded billions of years from now, Lemmy would be a universal constant. As Bennett, the head of the St. Remedius Advanced Technologies department, was quoted as saying, “Lemmy isn’t God after all, but he’s a remarkably versatile facsimile.”
(Many thanks to music critic Mark Barsotti for his contributions.)
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.