Suicide booth

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A 'Stop and drop' style Suicide Booth on Futurama

A suicide booth is a fictional machine for committing suicide. Suicide booths appear in the Japanese manga Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita and the American animated series Futurama, while compulsory self-execution booths were featured in an episode of the original Star Trek TV series.

The concept can be found as early as the 1895 story "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers, in which the Governor of New York presides over the opening of the first "Government Lethal Chamber" in New York City in the future year of 1920, following the repeal of laws against suicide: "The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair." (...) He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the street was absolute. "There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life."

1 Futurama
2 Star Trek
3 In other stories
4 In reality

In the world of Futurama, Stop'n'Drop suicide booths resemble phone booths and cost one quarter per use. The booths have two modes of death: "quick & painless," or "slow & horrible". "Quick and painless" is only shown from outside the booth as a bright flash around the door and a whooshing noise. "Slow and horrible" involves a variety of electrical discharges and power tools (including drills and saws). It ends with a single thrust and twist of a knife aimed at the average human gut.

After a mode of death is selected and executed, the machine cheerfully says, "You are now dead. Thank you for using Stop'n'Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008."

The first appearance of a suicide booth in Futurama is in the first episode, in which the character Bender wants to use it. Fry at first mistakes the suicide booth for a phone booth, and Bender offers to share it with him. Fry requests a collect call, which the machine interprets as "slow and horrible". It then turns out that "slow and horrible" can be survived by careful contortion around the implements, leading Bender to accuse the machine of being a rip-off.

In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "A Taste of Armageddon", people who were deemed war casualties by the government of Eminiar VII were required to enter suicide booths. Treaty arrangements require that everyone that is calculated as "dead" in the hypothetical thermonuclear war simulated using computers actually dies, without actually damaging any infrastructure. In the end, the computers are destroyed, the war can no longer be calculated in this way, the treaty breaks down, and faced with a real threat, (presumably) peace begins.

In Robert Sheckley's "Immortality, Inc." (1958), the protagonist wakes up in an unfamiliar future and while wandering dazed by a starkly changed New York finds himself in what he thinks might be a bread line, but turns out to be a line for the suicide booths. Unlike in Futurama, however, the service appears to be free.

In Ivan Efremov's 1968 novel The Bull's Hour a similar idea of suicide booths referred to as the Palaces of tender death (Russian: Дворцы нежной смерти). They're commonly used on the Planet Tormance to control the birth rate.

While not a booth, suicide chambers are used to allow people to choose a pleasant form of euthanasia in the movie Soylent Green.

Kurt Vonnegut's "purple-roofed Ethical Suicidal Parlors" appear in several stories: "Welcome to the Monkey House" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" In these Ethical Suicide Parlors a patron receives a free meal in the adjoining Howard Johnson's diner before committing suicide. It is considered a citizen's patriotic duty to commit suicide.

The closest thing to a suicide booth to have been actually constructed is the Euthanasia Machine invented by Philip Nitschke, consisting of a piece of software named Deliverance which asks the patient a series of questions, and automatically administers a lethal injection if the correct answers are made. The system and questions are so constructed that the supplier of the machine cannot be held responsible for ending the life of the patient, who takes responsibility by operating it.

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