But it’s more than that. No more needles, tubes and wires. No more plastic bags on heads. No more yuck factor. Sarco is the answer that rational suicide advocates have always dreamed of, and it’s coming soon to a 3D printer near you, with the plans free of charge – to paying Exit members and eHandbook subscribers, of course. The perfect death, delivered – to anyone with an internet connection.
On the day of the conference, Philip appears on the livestream with a 1:7 3D-printed model of Sarco, which looks like it could be one of my kids’ Octonaut toys. He explains that liquid nitrogen will make the machine silent – the gas won’t roar like it does when it comes out of a canister – but it will also make the temperature inside Sarco drop, so users will need to dress accordingly. Apart from the nitrogen, there is one other element that can’t yet be 3D printed: the digital keypad used to unlock Sarco’s door. Users will get the code they need to access it (valid for twenty-four hours) only if they pass some kind of psychiatric test to determine that they are of sound mind. But Philip explains that even the keypad will be 3D printable in future. You can already print copper and electronic circuitry. It’s just a matter of time.
I’m cynical enough to think that Philip has created a competition just so he can win the prize money, but it turns out that’s not the case. Sarco is ineligible because it’s Philip’s baby. In the end, the ReBreather-DeBreather and the GULPS monoxide generator win, but they don’t make it into the international coverage of NuTech. Sarco is all anyone wants to talk about, and it’s breaking news everywhere from the Sun to Fox News to Vice Newsweek is particularly impressed. ‘Meet the Elon Musk of Assisted Suicide’, its headline reads. ‘His latest death machine, the Sarco, is his Tesla,’ it continues. ‘The Sarco is sleek – and, Nitschke stresses, luxurious […] It is, in short, the Model S of death machines.’
Philip cannot get enough of this comparison. He puts it in the next Exit newsletter, and his Wikipedia page is quickly updated with his new moniker. Who cares if there are thirteen other Dr Deaths? He’s the only Elon Musk of suicide.
For the next year and a half, almost all the messages I’m sent from Exit are about Sarco: how the 3D printer in Haarlem is buzzing away to produce the first full-sized prototype; how YouTube ‘Sinks to New Depths in Censorship’ because it removed the livestream video of Sarco at NuTech from Philip’s channel; how Philip will be at the Amsterdam Funeral Fair with a virtual reality headset, so users can experience a Sarco death without actually dying.
Finally, the news I have been waiting for arrives. ‘After three years in development, the world’s first 3D-printed euthanasia capsule will go on display at the Palazzo Michiel at Venice Design,’ the press release reads. ‘I am extremely pleased that Sarco is here in the centre of the art world in Venice,’ Philip writes. ‘This year’s Biennale’s tagline “May You Live in Interesting Times” could not be more perfect.’
It’s as if Philip’s creation were on display at the Biennale itself. It’s not. The Venice Design Fair is timed to coincide with the prestigious contemporary art exhibition, but it’s entirely separate – a fringe event, if you will. Still, after Edinburgh, perhaps Philip is determined to nail all of the world’s great festivals. Kervorkian had jazz flute and oil paintings; Philip has comedy and eye-catching Dutch design.
The Venice Design Fair is free and open to the public. There will be a big press launch on the opening night, where Sarco will finally be unveiled. This, I cannot miss.
* * *
The Palazzo Michiel del Brusà is a Venetian fantasy of baroque majesty and exposed brickwork, right on the Grand Canal. The ground floor hall is level with the water, illuminated by afternoon sunlight that streams in through the arched doorways. A pyramid of fruit has been placed on a plinth at the centre of the room, demanding to be Instagrammed. People buzz around it in too-short trousers, long coats and ochre satin shoes – ridiculous, to my unsophisticated eyes – selfie sticks aloft. In their free hands, they hold glasses of Prosecco, or little plates with shavings of parmesan and cubes of ham.
I follow a woman in silver stilettos and a floor-length ivory cape up a flight of stone stairs. There is an enormous yellow sponge on a wooden platform. The placard on the wall says it’s called XXXXXL Sponge, from a Dutch designer’s SPONGE series, and is ‘a design reflection on the damages caused by human on nature’. A doorway is covered in different-sized rubber orbs in shades of cream and grey, made by an Egyptian jewellery designer; it’s impossible to walk beneath them without reaching up to squish them. There are all sorts of different kinds of mirrors and chairs, loungers and pouffes, as if this is a fair for people who like to look at their reflection and then rest. The chatter is in French, English, Russian and Chinese as well as Italian. Most of the guests only view the exhibits through their phone screens.
I turn a corner and come to a doorway. THIS ROOM MAY CONTAIN SENSITIVE CONTENT FOR SOME VIEWERS, says an enticing notice. In the centre of the space, underneath angled spotlights, is Sarco itself, in Exit’s trademark purple, lacquered and sparkling, dramatic and striking and very weird. The upholstered seating inside it is as elegant and reclined as any of the other chaises longues on display here. But there’s a roughness to Sarco’s body that I wasn’t expecting: the lamination of the 3D printing is clearly visible on the grey parts of its frame, giving it an unfinished, home-made look. This is intentional, a placard explains: it has been ‘deliberately left untreated in order to demonstrate the raw 3D print process’. But I’d been anticipating something more perfect. James Bond would not die in this.
And he wouldn’t fit in this, either. It’s small. It’s definitely for the shorter suicidal person, and even then it would be quite a claustrophobic death. It might have a canopy door like the DeLorean from Back to the Future, but it would be impossible for an older person or anyone with mobility problems to climb through it. Could any of the people I met in Covent Garden really print this and put it together, even if they could squeeze themselves in? Would it even work, if they did? The illuminated digital entry keypad is in a little recess next to the door, but nothing happens when I press the numbers. There’s a drawer at the base of the capsule where the liquid nitrogen is supposed to go, but it’s fused shut. This doesn’t look like a functional machine.
I follow the sound of live lounge jazz and head back downstairs, trying to find Philip. I look on the decking beside the canal, crowded with people taking more selfies. Someone has even brought a dog in a pram with them. A fat Jack Russell. Henny Penny! And there is Fiona, and Philip. The Hawaiian shirts are gone: Philip’s in a beige linen jacket, a fetching straw hat and a black neckerchief. His eyes are startled to see me behind his circular glasses, but he shakes my hand. He shuffles back up the stone stairs with me to the Sarco room, his bottle of Italian beer still in his hand.
I cut to the chase. ‘Does it work, this version I’m looking at now?’
‘We’ve measured what happens to the oxygen level inside the capsule.’
‘You’ve tested it?’
‘Yeah, it works extremely well. You start at 21 per cent oxygen, which we’re all breathing here, and within a minute you’re down to less than 1 per cent. We sort of know what happens when you’re put into a 1 per cent oxygen environment: it is actually quite soporific, disorientating, almost intoxicating. Here’s Alex.’
He gestures over to a tall man in a neatly pressed blue suit: Alexander Bannink, the Dutch engineer who usually designs buses, trains, medical splints and prosthetics, but is now making Philip’s ideas about death stylish for the first time. They give each other brotherly pats on the back.
‘What do you think?’ Alex asks me, immediately.
I don’t know how to answer this. It looks like nothing else I have seen before, but it doesn’t look like it works. The keypad seems like an afterthought, when it should be the first thing you work on if you are serious about rational suicide being rational. I am impressed and underwhelmed, intrigued and disturbed.
‘That is a good quest
ion,’ I reply. ‘I think it looks like a vehicle, doesn’t it?’
This seems to be the right answer. ‘That was Alex’s idea! To get the idea of movement. In fact, a lot of the ideas about the whole thing were Alex’s.’
‘How would you describe Sarco? What is it?’ I ask.
‘It’s the demedicalization of the dying process,’ Philip says, as people waft around his creation, taking photos. ‘What I’m worried about, in the general trend of people seizing control of their end-of-life options, is the increasing medicalization of the process. We aren’t really gaining control, we are divesting control to the authority of some other body, usually the medical profession. Sarco allows a person to say, “I make the decision, and I don’t need any other ‘expert’ help.”’ Philip is the doctor gone rogue to give people true power over death.
‘The only medical involvement will be initially to determine whether you’ve got mental capacity. Part two of this process is the development of an artificial intelligence test for mental capacity,’ he continues. ‘The keypad won’t work unless you’ve passed the test. There’s a lot of work going into it. And of course there’s a lot of opposition, people saying it can’t be done, there’s no way artificial intelligence can replace a psychiatrist. It’s not hard to do. Whether or not we accept it is the question. Within the medical profession, there’s a lot of resistance to any form of artificial intelligence taking over their roles. There’s big changes going on, in terms of what’s possible.’
Alex is very proud of Sarco’s green credentials. 3D printing means there’s no carbon involved in transporting it. ‘The base is biodegradable plastic, PLA, basically potato starch, or sugar beet starch,’ he says, as if this were made of old chips, instead of a substance that actually takes decades to degrade properly. ‘All the finishes are as environmentally friendly as possible, and the lacquer is water-based car lacquer.’
‘Why was that important?’
‘Well, because maybe you’re buried in it.’
‘And even if we don’t bury it, we want to be environmentally friendly,’ Philip interjects. ‘We want to make a small global footprint. Some have come to us saying, “I want to die now because I’m consuming resources. I’ve come to my natural end of life and I don’t want to be a burden on the planet, I want to do the right thing by the planet.” That’s an increasing thing we’re seeing.’ This makes me think of Bob Dent, the first patient to use the Deliverance machine, who so hated being a burden on his wife. No one wants to be a burden.
No matter what Philip has said, I still don’t believe that this thing in front of me works. So I ask Alex.
‘It’s still a concept,’ Alex replies carefully. ‘Because of the time schedule for Venice, the base is not functional, but the top part is.’
‘Have you ever lain down inside it?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ Philip says, taking a sip of beer.
‘I’m scared,’ Alex laughs.
‘The arse might drop out of it. We didn’t want to do that, days before the launch.’
‘Would a tall person find it comfortable?’
‘It’s an individual project,’ Alex says. ‘A large person could get a print-to-size Sarco. But it depends on which route Philip is going to take. If you have a clinic, we may end up with one-size-fits-all.’
‘That’s what has to happen in Switzerland,’ Philip nods.
Philip is very excited about Switzerland. Exit is going to open a clinic there, the first place in the world where you can be helped to die in a completely non-medical setting. They will be able to provide people directly with the machine, without any 3D printing, because it won’t matter if they’re assisting in Switzerland. He says he’s already found premises and recruited staff. ‘Switzerland is the only place we can give someone Sarco to use. If you want to use it back home in the UK, well, you’ll have to print it.’
‘How long did it take to print out?’
They look at each other, smiles twitching.
‘Shall we say it?’ Alex laughs. ‘It took a little while. We were continuously printing for four months.’
‘Wow,’ I say. ‘So it’s a peaceful death, at a time of your choosing, so long as you are planning very far in advance.’
‘Yeah, this doesn’t lend itself to the impetuous user,’ says Philip dryly.
They won’t tell me how much it cost them to print out, other than it was ‘too much’, and funded by ‘some big Exit donations’. To be fair to Philip, this isn’t something he imagines people rushing to print any time soon. He thinks Sarco will be in widespread use by 2030, when he expects large-scale 3D printing to be commonplace and affordable. But it will still be printed in sections; the frame, the body panels and other components will all need to be assembled, it turns out. And then there’s the gas.
‘Where do you get the liquid nitrogen from?’
‘You buy it,’ Philip says, wearily.
‘From where?’
‘Er, a liquid nitrogen seller,’ he scoffs, as if everyone has one on their high street. Perhaps Max Dog will have its own range soon. ‘There are plenty of them around and it’s not a restricted product in any way,’ he adds.
After you print it out, pour in the nitrogen and punch in your code, there are more buttons inside Sarco to make it work: a green ‘die’ button to initiate the gas, and a red ‘stop’ button, which you can press if you change your mind. (They can only be pressed from inside – a safety feature intended to prevent Sarco being used to murder someone.) There’s also an escape hatch you can push if you feel so inclined, but it doesn’t sound like there would be much time to decide to do so.
‘You’ll lose consciousness in a minute,’ Philip explains. ‘If you breathe normally, you get into a disorientated state very quickly, have a feeling of euphoria and intoxication, lose consciousness, and then you will be dead in five minutes.’
But Alex says intentionality is built into the design. ‘It is surrounded by a perimeter of roughness, it holds you back, tells you, “Think again.”’ He puts his palm up, like a cop controlling traffic. ‘And then there’s also softness, so maybe you want to get closer to it, and it’s something you are acquainted with, because it looks like a car, but it’s a strange car because it’s asymmetrical. You can’t get in here –’ he points to the side without the control panel, the driver’s side in the UK – ‘because there is no door, so you have to go around. You have to do something yourself in order to go further to the next step that brings you closer to dying by yourself in Sarco. Sarco empowers people to decide. It tells other people that the decision made was the right one, the one the person who ended up inside it wanted.’ Sarco’s instructions have to be intuitive, for legal reasons. ‘If you have to explain to them how to do it, then you are helping. You need the machine to tell you.’
But Philip hasn’t just made Sarco so he can get away with helping people die. He’s going to use it to make death sexy. ‘I like the sense of style, the sense of occasion, the opportunity to redefine death and make it into a ceremony, as opposed to something that you sneak away from and do in private. That doesn’t suit everybody, but there are a lot of people that it does. It’s a very nice looking device, and something that you can take out so it’s looking out over the Alps or the North Sea or the deserts in Australia. The place where you want to go.’
‘This isn’t necessarily about dignity in dying, it’s about death being an event?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, nodding slowly. ‘It seems to appeal to a certain group of people. The people who are making contact with us now saying they want to use Sarco see it as something that gives them the chance to mark the event, in the way that sitting in a room and drinking a glass of Nembutal doesn’t. This provides a sense of occasion, that they are leaving and travelling. Some people like the idea of saying bye, pulling down the door: “I’m moving, you’re staying.”’ They sound like the sort of people who would love to attend their own funerals.
Sarco also has the allure of the ‘euphoria
’ Philip keeps going on about, of dying high. He says he experienced the intoxication of hypoxia himself, during his air force days, when he lived through a rapid plane depressurization. He had a good time.
‘It’s horses for courses. I’m not saying everyone is going to want to climb into a Sarco. Some people say, “I don’t like the idea; I want to be able to hold the person I love when I die,” and this doesn’t allow that,’ he continues.
‘You could print one of these to take two people, like you could print it for tall people,’ Alex interjects, helpfully. ‘All of that is a possibility.’
‘But with two people how do you make sure that both people consent to dying?’ I ask.
‘It’s only a software problem – they both have to pass the test,’ Philip says.
‘But how can you tell that it’s not just one person putting in the codes?’
Philip grits his teeth. There’s a ten-second pause. Then they both fall about laughing.
‘End of interview!’ Alex shouts. ‘Cut!’
Surrounded by designers in Venice at sunset, it would be easy to excuse how poorly thought out Sarco is, and treat it as a think piece, a talking point, just like the XXXXXL Sponge. But this is not Oron Catts’ frog meat. This has been billed as a viable design, funded by people who are desperate to take control of their own deaths, and it is actively being promised to paying Exit members, who are flooding Philip with enquiries. This is not a joke.
‘In ten years’ time, do you really expect people to be dying inside Sarcos, all over the world?’ I ask Philip.
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