‘SuissID’ by Vincent Gerber

Set in Switzerland, in an unspecified future, the company SuissID operates in the field of assisted suicide. Its activities are presented in two alternating narrative strands: in the first, readers follow several phone calls between Monsieur Lampin, who wants to die, and a SuissID employee to arrange an appointment for his suicide; in the second, SuissID founder and CEO Philippe Bochart explains the company's history, activities and strategic goals in a radio interview. Monsieur Lampin's conversations with the SuissID employee show that assisted suicide is an easily accessible service: a phone call is all it takes, and customers can choose from numerous suicide methods depending on their needs and financial means, without having to justify their wish to die in any way. Ethical due care criteria, such as the presence of an unbearable suffering or mental capacity are no longer required. As a customer of SuissID, Monsieur Lampin is king, in the absolutist sense that only his will to commit suicide is decisive. The radio interview with CEO Bochart further shows that despite the company’s claims of strict customer orientation, all it is really concerned with is its own financial success and market growth.

Gerber's short story was published in the science fiction anthology ‘Futurs insolites: Laboratoire d'anticipation helvétique’ (ed. by Elena Avdija and Jean-François Thomas), whose contributions were intended to imaginatively explore future Swiss society. No fewer than three of the 14 stories deal with the topic of assisted dying, which illustrates its importance for both authors and editors. In Gerber's future scenario, assisted suicide has become a purely commercially-orientated business, and an extremely lucrative one at that. The state, or other regulatory bodies that would set guidelines for companies such as SuissID, are completely absent. The genre-typical novelty of Gerber’s science fiction story is that Article 115 of the Swiss Criminal Code, which in the real Switzerland of today criminalises assisted suicide if it is carried out ‘for selfish motives’, seems to no longer exist, allowing an unleashed market-radical practice to prevail. Despite its grotesque distortion, Gerber's dystopian-satirical vision of the future is by no means completely detached from the present. On the one hand, it gives literary form to specific aspects of assisted dying that are already being criticised today: the strong emphasis on the value of individual self-determination and autonomy, as well as the increasing liberalisation of assisted dying regulations. On the other, it reflects the ongoing ‘neoliberalisation’ of several societies, through which more and more services are being privatised and subjected to a market and competitive logic. The text thus reads like a warning: states must fulfil their responsibilities, particularly in sensitive areas such as health, to guarantee the protection of human life.