Death, And How We Give It To You

So, in reader questions of the day:

I swear I saw an entry for the levels of execution, ranging from kill current instantiation, restore, to kill them, their back ups and the servers they rode in on.

Am I misremembering?

And since I don't recall any such thing existing, I thought I might as well write a post on the general topic of How The Empire Kills People.

But before we do that and getting into executions, it's worth mentioning the fairly obvious distinction between "make them dead dead", "make them briefly dead¹", and "remind them how easily we could make them dead". This distinction shows up in a lot of places, such as the legal distinction between cognicide and corpicide, the ISS distinction between "serious censure" and "most serious censure" (as mentioned in this post), and those services which one can purchase from the Regretful Servants of the Mortal Dictum².

None of these, however, are relevant to executions, because if the judicial system wants you dead, it wants you gone³. It doesn't deal in the lesser varieties.

So now let's talk executions through the ages.

Conventional

The Sword and the Gun

In Our clemency We shall grant even the vilest a swift and clean end; not because We pity them, but rather because it is intolerable that good men should spend their days as a cause of suffering in Our name.

- Valentia I Amanyr

In ancient days, the traditional standard for execution was a single sword-thrust through the heart, delivered by an executioner skilled in that particular maneuver. Once reliable firearms had been invented, this was replaced by the firing squad.

These particular methods were chosen for being, when executed properly, quick and clean and leaving a reasonably intact body fit for the pyre. Also, perhaps even more important to Imperial sensibilities, they afford the condemned the opportunity to stand up, look death in the eye, and face it with whatever dignity they can muster.

Flames of Purification

Of course, there are criminals and then there are criminals. While it exists now as a sort of theological spandrel in the justice system, those who subscribed to ancient beliefs in reincarnation were not inclined favorably to the notion that those whose crimes appeared to result from some serious entropic deformation of the soul should be reborn with said deformation and go on to repeat their previous incarnation's misdeeds.

Fortunately, this was something they absolutely could fight with fire. After all, while fire is a thing which transforms (hence its use in cremations), it is also a thing which purifies. You can see where this is going.

But - which will doubtlessly confuse my many human readers - remember that quotation from Valentia Amanyr up above? Just because you're going to burn the Entropy out of someone's soul is no excuse for causing unnecessary suffering in the process. The fire is a thing which purifies, not the pain, which is an unnecessary and undesired by-product of the process. Thus, from their earliest days, the flames of purification started out with a bowl of a rather potent pharmaceutical cocktail that made it essentially impossible to feel any pain during the process⁵.

In the modern era, the flames of purification involve a lethal chamber into which a bolus of fusion plasma is vented. No-one lives long enough to know that they're being vaporized.

Clement

In Certain Older Civilized Societies...

...people who screwed up spectacularly enough but who aren't, per se, bad people might be afforded a quiet moment with a sword upon which to fall, or a pistol with a single shot, to atone, save honor, and spare the world embarrassment.

The Empire is a very old civilized society.

"Chains and Pyres"

In cases, however, where the case proceeds to trial and the verdict is death, and yet the prisoner is repentant and cooperative, another option may be made available in the name of clemency.

The death sentence cannot be lifted - that would be unjust - but rather than execution they may be offered the option of "chains and pyres"; the opportunity to earn back one's honor by undertaking extremely dangerous tasks at high risk of death until said tasks kill you⁶.

Sometimes this means recruitment for dangerous work under fire or suicide missions by the Imperial Military Service⁷, or by the Emergency Management Authority for clean-up or other work in heavily contaminated areas. It may also mean participation in dangerous experiments requiring sophont subjects. All that you're guaranteed is that the task you're assigned to will probably kill you, and that when one of them eventually does you'll have paid your debt and earned back your honor.

Other

Spacing

Yes, the spacer cliché. Certainly not encouraged, because floating corpses create a hazard to navigation and someone's going to have to clean that up, but insofar as small starships don't usually come with dedicated brigs or space to spare for judicial equipment that they'll rarely if ever use, the captain's prerogative to order pirates, hijackers, mutineers, saboteurs, and other imminent threats to ship, crew, and passengers thrown out the airlock⁸ remains on the books.

Jarring

This one is the horror show, and I should emphasize that it's also one that is never used.

What, never?

No, never.

What, never?

Well... hardly ever.

You see, jarring is an archaic form of execution once used in the cities of the Solar Gulf, in which the condemned are placed inside a tall jar of thick, toughened glass by the roadside, with the crimes for which they are condemned engraved on an attached plaque, to die slowly of thirst, starvation, and solar exposure.

While abandoned as a tool of law enforcement well before the Solar Gulf was Imperialized, by various acts of legal legerdemain references to it have found their way - if one reads really carefully and closely - into the book of procedures for martial law and military government of occupied territories. An area in which it still qualifies as "hardly ever used".

But if you are, gods help you, occupied or being peacekept by the Empire, and if you are the sort of people who are moderately fond of committing atrocities, and if you are the sort of people who aren't smart enough to realize that the military governor was absolutely sincere about killing you for it, even after the fact⁹...

...well, sometimes you may end up being the instructive examples in the Real Life trope section for Light is Not Good, Good is Not Soft, and the as-yet unwritten Light and Good May, Nonetheless, Be Absolutely Fucking Terrifying If They Need To Be¹⁰.

1. i.e., just kill the body they're walking around in, causing inconvenience and cost and some unpleasant prunable memories, but not actually ending their existence. Even if it does get them out of your hair for now.
2. The last of the three is their most popular service, consisting of having people wake up to find a nightblossom on their pillow and realizing that a professional assassin was right there and neither you nor your security saw a thing.
3. Which is why all of the variants we're about to talk about also come with having your mindprint introduced to the official list of people who would be extremely ill-advised to exist anywhere the Worlds' identity infrastructure reaches, or on any processor that isn't absolutely air-gapped against hunter-killer software with a taste for any sufficiently you-like process⁴.
4. There's always some clever bugger who thinks making a noetic backup and then forgetting that they've done it and where it is will protect them from ORE. It won't.
5. Still not pleasant by any means, obviously, and yet.
6. Although it is always possible to opt out of "chains and pyres" at any time, and resume the original sentence of execution.
7. In, say, the 79th Imperial Legion, the Legion of the Dead.
8. Or, where available, expelled from a missile tube.
9. And even if their surname is Sargas.
10. The scary thing is not slowly killing people in gibbet-jars as examples. The really scary thing is affording people full, thorough, and public due process before slowly killing them in gibbet-jars as examples.