Cremating people isn’t enough to make sure they’re dead if you have backup records and nanotech. I don’t know if that approach has been used on a naive villain in fiction.
“The suspect disintegrated himself,” wept the overseer. “Complete nanodissolution. Now we’ll never know who he was. Could have a backup anywhere.”
Collapsa-T clucked. “He wept a single tear while climbing the ladder. I have retrieved sufficient DNA to extend a partial quantum snowflake.” The device retrograded briefly, folding all eleven dimensions like protein. “Success!” it finally decided. “In the 312th tier of the 99th fold of a relatively low-probability third-order curve, I have found a faint residual memory that yielded to electrical torture.” A few calculations later, it had a sufficiently distributed bell curve: “The suspect is Hamma bin Tio. He is a combat algaeist, which explains the theft at the fungal refectory. His preferred backup venue is the Starbucks in Cairo.”
Cremating people isn’t enough to make sure they’re dead if you have backup records and nanotech. I don’t know if that approach has been used on a naive villain in fiction.
“Elementary”