I recently rewatched STTNG The Most Toys, which feastured the Varon-T Disruptor. The disruptor is noted for “[tearing] the body apart at the molecular level from the inside out, resulting in a relatively slow and excruciating death.” Well, it looked like about 4 seconds of excrutiating pain, followed by death. Once you’re dead, the pain and any lasting effect or memory is gone. And they think this is horrioble enough to ban? Being pushed out an airlock without a suit would hurt more, and for longer. Or whatever it was that happened to Xon on STTMP.
So in effect, it is no worse than many “common” deaths. I bet jumping off the Golden Gate is worse that the Varon-T. First, you get the pain of having your legs jammed into your abdomen, then the pain of all your internal organs ripped loose, Or, like dying in a head-on auto collision without air bags. Personally, I’ll take the disruptor.
So I propose, if you want to really hurt somebody, the Varon-C Disruptor. It feels as if you simultaneously have bone, colon and uterine cancer, and it takes two months for you to die, and pain killers have no effect.
Or the Varon-WTC Disruptor. It feels as if you were in a large building that collapsed, and you are trapped in a space not quite as big as you, with a piece of rebar through your calf muscle, and the only water is the little bit that trickles down, which could be rescue dog pee. And it takes a week to die, and at the end it feels like your body was ripped in half by a backhoe removing debris.
I think the Federation would definitely ban these. Does anyone have their own ideas?
I always thought it interesting that the Sarlacc prolonged the life of people. Seems to me all you’d need is Essence of Sarlacc, rather than some sort of funny adherence to the precepts of the Dark Side of the Force.
An Algotoxin injector, from Brightness Falls From the Air:
It’s notable that when algotoxin’s creators realized what they had invented everyone involved submitted willingly to selective memory erasure and the destruction of their records in an attempt to keep it from being recreated.
Aside: Someone else actually read that? Tiptree is capable of so much better than that, and I kept on wondering if the bad parts were actually the reason why she wrote the book in the first place, with the good parts being purely incidental.
When you criminalize the Varon-T disrupter then only criminals will have the Varon-T disrupter. Or maybe there’s a fast and slow setting? 4 seconds is a pretty quick dead even if it is so painful.
It’s a TV show, and someone was going to get shot with it. Were they gonna stop the episode for an extended period of time while someone dies horribly? Would they just shoot the person, then continue with the scene while the person screams on and on just offscreen? I’m picturing Will Ferrell’s character from the Austin Powers movie now.
Plus, special fx cost a lot more back then, and weren’t as good, so they shortened it for looks, story expediency and monitory reasons, I suspect. I bet they would have made it at least a few seconds longer, though, if it weren’t for FX costs/issues.
