[World Building] No Suicide

[Kyle]

I had a throw away idea on my drive in this morning, but as I've thought about it, I decided I wanted to put it on the boards and see how we can flesh this out. So here's the basic premise:

In this world, if someone commits suicide, then they alter the fabric of space-time so that it is as if they were never conceived.

So IF we live in a world where this is true (and I leave the possibility that it's not true, but just a giant government conspiracy), then as we sit and exist in the world, no one has ever committed suicide.

Questions:

1- Do the people know that this function exists? Has a religious-like belief sprung up from the observation that no one has ever killed themselves?

2- What constitutes killing yourself? If I torture you into killing yourself, does that count?

3- Depending on the answers to the other questions, can the authorities in this town attempt to largely eradicate many crimes by punishing convicts with "forced suicide."

[Tahlvin]

1) How could anybody possibly know it exists? I mean, if a person is sitting there and says to herself, my life sucks, I want to end it. She's never heard of anyone committing suicide before. Heck, there probably isn't a name for it! She thinks she'll be the first one. She does the deed, but immediately afterwards, nobody remembers she even existed, as if she was never there, so nobody is aware that she committed suicide, nobody is aware she was ever even there to begin with.

2) That's up to you, I guess. But I would say that anything done under outside duress, such as being tortured or forced by the authorities, would not count as actual suicide, since it's not really the person's free-will to commit the act.

3) They could if they were aware of how it worked. But based on my answer to question 1, they wouldn't know how it works unless they have inside information, or there's some other sort of loophole at play. For example, perhaps the deceased are actually taken to an alternate timeline rather than dying, and that's why there's no body left behind. They still retain all of their memories and knowledge, even though knowledge of them has been removed from the original timeline. And the deceased can interact with the original timeline via extra-dimensional travel or communication. In that case, it's possible one of these deceased person could inform the inhabitants of the original timeline about what happens and how it works; say they tried to contact a former loved one, only to find out that person had no knowledge or recollection of them at all. That could invalidate my answers to 1 and 3, since now there's a way for the knowledge of this behavior to be introduced, although they would have to be able to convince people of the truth of their story.

[Kyle]

[Zen]

[Iantha]

[Kyle]

[Zen]

But there is no feasible way to scientifically test it. History gets re-written. The person who commits suicide ceases to be a subject in the experiment. No records exist of them. I don't see any way that technology can overcome this... (You aren't reading book three of my series without me knowing it, are you? There are a couple of interesting similarities in this... not dealing with suicide, but with experimental records proving a change in the world-line...)

[Kyle]

[Zen]