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.”
Harry has been learning an Evil Overlord List (warning: tv tropes), but apparently he had to figure out #13 the hard way.
Coincidentally enough, today’s Overcoming Bias post is about the same thing.
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”
I wonder if he is going to learn #92 as well!