Trope-a-Day: Mercy Kill

Mercy Kill: Members of the military/intelligence community, people whose work takes them into galactic bad neighborhoods, and hell, even overly paranoid tourists who’ve been listening too much to the It’s Barbarian Darkness Out There, Folks style of galactic reporting tend to have equipment fitted to let them do this to themselves, should things go horribly wrong, or even be obviously about to go horribly wrong.

Of course, since they undoubtedly have noetic backups elsewhere if not the extra-special version of said equipment that will dump a copy of their mind-state to a safe location via tangle channel should they need to use it, it tends to lack something in the Kill department.  That it’s also possible to have one fitted with enough extra antimatter on the power side of things to turn your head into a decently sized bomb when you trigger it may also put it somewhere in the Overkill department, albeit still not for you.