I can shrink myself to 3 mm and teleport into someone else's body. How can I make them die of a "natural" cause?

Question

The world is, as we all know, in a sad state: corrupt politicians constantly trying to diminish democracy to increase their own power; international corporations ignoring laws; mobsters taking over large parts of the economy because they can.

Now, fortunately, I have discovered I have a superpower: I can shrink myself to a few mm in size and teleport anywhere, even inside another body! And I decided to become a superhero by using my power to kill the worst of those people.

Only .. I need the deaths to look natural. The people I want to kill don't exist in a vacuum; they have friends and followers, and a death that looks unnatural might make the situation worse, not better. If the 75 year old president of Elbonia drops dead from a heart attack, people will mourn him, but if the 35 year old president dies from poisoning, the Elbonians will start a war with their neighbors because who else could have poisoned the president? Likewise, an obvious unnatural death of a drug boss will lead to a gang war, which I want to avoid. I'm a superhero, after all, not a supervillain!

So, once inside their body, how can I kill people - under the assumption that a very competent pathologist or forensic investigator will examine the body, and I want them to be convinced the cause was natural?

• Of course I could drop some toxic substance, from botulinum to an insulin overdose, but those will be detected.
• I could drop some cancerogenic substance which might not be detected anymore when the victim develops cancer, but I want them to die within hours or days, not months or years.
• Slitting open a main artery would work as well, but I'd be giving the pathologist a heck of a puzzle, and they probably wouldn't attest to a natural death.
• I might be lucky and find an aneurysm that I'd just have to punch a few times to make it break, but most people wouldn't have one I could use to begin with.
• Blocking an artery to cause a stroke would work as well, but again be puzzling at the autopsy if the victim's veins are generally in a good condition.

I need a way to kill my victims and make the investigator say something like "this is uncommon in people that age, but it happens now and then. Bad luck, but no foul play". Actually I need many different ways. If one drug boss dies of a rare cause, it's bad luck. If ten of them die, it's already suspicious, but if ten of them die of the same rare cause, nobody will believe in chance any more.

So, which ways do I have to kill those guys?

(Please, take the science-based tag with a grain of salt. Of course the whole premise of the question has nothing to do with science at all. But I'd like the answers to be based in biology/medicine; real causes of death that could undetectably be caused by messing with the inside of a body).

Answer 1

I really like how Daniel B explained in details how to teleport into someone's body and make the person pass out biologically. I myself don't know much into the science part of this so I would like to extend from Daniel B's answer.

Do the move to cause accidents.

Much like how an example is given. Do it when the person is on the stairs, which will make them fall and can cause a lethal injury more or less. This is where the part I would like to extend.

Do it on the street. Be it when the person is crossing the street, or while driving. Make the person suddenly pass out while driving in a dangerous rainy night could also be lethal. You don't have to make it crash into other people's car (because you want to be a hero, alright). You can just make the car out of control and hit something around there like trees or poles, or, even better, off the cliff.

Do it when the person is doing something ordinary but potentially dangerous when unconscious. For example, when the person is climbing a ladder -- make them fall, when the person is swimming -- make them drown, or when the person is eating -- make them choke.

Answer 2

Syncope on staircases

Syncope, or fainting, happens when blood or oxygen stops getting to your brain. A very nasty time to get it is while walking down a staircase. If you pass out mid step, the physical consequences can be devastating.

The easiest way to accomplish this is by teleporting into their carotid artery and directly applying pressure to their carotid baroreceptors. This will trigger their Baroreflex.

The baroreflex provides a rapid negative feedback loop in which an elevated blood pressure causes the heart rate to decrease. Decreased blood pressure decreases baroreflex activation and causes heart rate to increase and to restore blood pressure levels. Their function is to sense pressure changes by responding to change in the tension of the arterial wall[1] The baroreflex can begin to act in less than the duration of a cardiac cycle (fractions of a second)

(From Wikipedia on baroreflex)

In other words, by applying pressure to the baroreceptor directly, you convince the body that there has been a blood pressure spike. In response, the body creates a rapid decrease in blood pressure, leading to rapid unconsciousness.

As a bonus, the heart won’t release any atrial natriuretic peptide to be detected in the post-mortem, so it’ll look like either an unfortunate trip and fall, or like a fainting spell.

If you want to be more direct, just crawl up a bit higher and either slit the arterial wall near the brain stem, or use your little body to block the flow at a narrow channel. Brain hemorrhages and strokes ain’t nothing to fuck with.

Answer 3

Ingested, self-administered poisons.

You can kill in any number of creative ways, but that takes effort. Why not use simple methods instead and simultaneously avoid the whole bloodpressure thing?

Lets say your target has an event where alcohol is available. You pick an alcohol type of their menu and keep teleporting it into their stomach, preferably near the end of the event. They get roaring drunk and eventually die of alcohol poisoning. Since its initial start is public no one can say he was forced to drink it, there's no traces of injections and everything points to them having drunk it themselves. Best case scenario's: he's already showing drunkenness before he leaves, then dies in a car accident as he drives home. If he doesnt have an accident (say a taxi is called) they can die of alcohol poisoning as they get home.

Besides alcohol you can use a number of oral drugs. If they are tripping their ass off as they are in a car they can easily kill themselves. Or in some cases you can fake an overdose of painkillers and alcohol, teleporting the offending remains in afterwards (it doesnt say you have to be 3mm tall so I assume a bottle and pill containers might be possible to teleport into a carseat or house).

As a counter to just killing people, why not wreck their lives instead? "Politician showed up tripping balls and puking drunk at his adress to congress/whatever, claims he has no idea how he got drugged". Its not exactly a big leap that he may have done it himself, especially if there's more instances of him showing up drugged in other places with no trace as to how it happened other than "he ate it himself". You can break their credibility, have them be drugged while trying to make decisions so people think they are absolute idiots and should not have their power anymore.

Answer 4

There's a window now for heart attacks to be unremarkable

So, normally, a 20-30 year old, in otherwise good health, dropping dead of a heart attack, would be weird. Fortunately for your main character, there's an explanation that covers for this at the moment!

It's everyone's favourite disease, COVID-19! It turns out that getting covid seems to probably cause myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart. This is generally a bad thing. There's also substantial arrhythmias seen in otherwise fit and healthy people, and we've seen a substantial increase in strokes and heart attacks in young men over the course of the pandemic.

So, at the moment, your character can kill with impunity, as long as he makes it look like a heart attack - I'd suggest, perhaps, teleporting next to the heart and shocking some of the nerves directly. You could get away with pretty substantial damage, as well, assuming the person is going to receive CPR almost immediately, which causes massive bruising. If you have access to a biolab, I'd think about dumping some inflammation causing chemicals in the mix, just to give a nice, simple explanation.

Citations

Covid causes higher risk of arrhythmias and myocarditis https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3

Uptick in heart attacks track covid infections:

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid-19-surges-linked-to-spike-in-heart-attacks/

Answer 5

Cause them to choke! People choke all the time, and it’s very unlikely that someone could choke to death as a result of foul play. So, wait for your target to begin eating, teleport into their throat (I’m assuming you could survive inside the human body, even though it’s basically impossible to do such, but hey you’re a superhero!), and hold that chunk of food in place, blocking airflow. Soon, they die! The only problem is that others could do the Heimlich maneuver, so wait until they’re eating alone.

Allergies! If this villain has an allergy, simply bring a butt-load of the allergen into their throat and let it go! They will probably die from ingesting it. Make sure, however, that you use a large number of trace amounts of the allergen (e.g. if they’re fatally allergic to eggplant like me, bring plenty of tiny chunks of eggplant). That way, it will seem like they ingested the allergen on accident.

Take advantage of their bad habits! Do they smoke? Do they drink? Do they eat a lot? If they have any self-destructive habits, do your homework and figure out how this could kill them. Then do that exact thing! Cause the death that their habit would have eventually caused, and no one will be suspicious!

No bad habits? Kill them with water! Some people, even if they’re evil, just don’t have bad habits. So you’re gonna have to kill them with one of the most essential substances ever: water. Get inside their system, and add lots of water until their blood salinity changes and they die. Unshrink, and add a bunch of empty, damp cups that look like they were full of water that got drank very fast, and place several ghost chili peppers near the body. It’ll look like they ate the peppers and drank too much water on accident.

If all else fails, use cars! All these previous ideas take resources, but this last one just needs you and your superpowers! While they’re driving, get in their brain and mess around. They will crash. If you want, you can add alcohol in the car so they look like they were intoxicated.

Answer 6

Interfering with the sinus node will cause arhythmia and cardiac arrest.

Almost anything with that size moving in the brain can trigger a transient ischemic event: after three or four episodes, dying of a larger event will yield a diagnosis of fatal idiopathic cerebral ischemia and be regarded as strange and unlikely, but "natural".

And being well inside what, on that scale, amounts to a mountain of inertial armor will allow you to survive having caused any kind of fatal accident; basically, moving anywhere risky (the street, for example) or driving any kind of vehicle will be sure death.

Moving substances from the inside to the immediate outside of the lower intestine will cause a peritonitis, and lesionating the lung tissue will cause an ab ingestis pulmonitis. Any of these will require hospitalization, and during hospitalization all sorts of complications may arise. The pathologists will wonder how someone could get a staphylococcus infection in the lungs or a never-before-seen endocarditis from E. Coli, but it's not very likely they'll be able to surmise what could have happened.

Then, either judicious and repeated application of several substances, or just repeated multiple tissutal lesions, have a high probability of exiting in cancer; at that point, an incredibly quick metastatization would raise many eyebrows, but the resulting death would in all probability be deemed natural.

Of course, just the fact that some specific group is dying at an unbelievable rate might attract attention. Prospective victims might employ advanced surveillance and all kinds of sensors to detect outside agencies; it is possible they'd think of micro-bots or engineered bugs being used for murder. Measures designed to catch those might well detect / capture you.

Answer 7

BECOME AN ACOUSTIC WEAPON, PUSH THE PERSON TO SUICIDE

By settling in the auditory canal, and by hiding between the eardrum and a partition teleported at the same time as you, and which resembles the eardrum in order to fool the doctors. This place allows you to breathe too.

Several choices are then offered, varying in intensity, going from the imitation of a tinnitus, to the infinite earworm song, up to, if necessary, becoming a small voice that makes the person crazy.

Answer 8

Imagining here that you, in 3mm form, have a way to avoid drowning in the blood stream, my vote would be for using yourself to mimic a clot reaching the brain, causing a vessel to rupture, bleed into the skull and, fairly rapidly, kill the person.

Pro's to this method:

• People sometimes do just keel over from a random clot getting stuck. It's not likely to be age related, and it's not something you can necessarily screen for like an aneurysm. It's just sheer bad luck.

• It's quick, bleeding to the brain is Bad and if it happens fast enough and in enough quantity the damage to the autonomic functions will kill you before the blood loss does

Con's to this method:

• It's survivable. Look at stroke victims, the person might not be at their full force afterwards, but if there's quick intervention it's not 100% death inducing

• you need to not drown in the blood yourself, are you somehow miniaturising a closed circuit rebreather set? I presume this is an option for handwavy science reasons, because getting into the blood stream is going to be half the battle.

On the upside, again if you do it on the stairs or in traffic, the person is likely to fall and die.

Answer 9

Let's say that the physical component of a person is the biological machine (biomac); the meat, and what it does in order to remain meat. Let's also say that 'natural causes' and 'accident' (nca) is first and foremost defined as not sinister, not malevolent, not murder legally, not intentional morally. Let's further define nca as culturally acceptable, non-political, credible despite being traumatising and presumptuous, indisputable despite being somewhat dubious. This gives us a framework of relevancy as there are many ways to remove a person, fatal and non-fatal. Ergo, i'm going to call these misadventures

Each of your targets will have a motivation: Political, moral, personal. Random and senseless slaughter is vague and boring. Each of your targets has a significant presence: That might be global like a president of a powerful nation, local like a warlord in control of an annexed territory, others. Each target has influence: a descriptive power or measurable control over the presence; and, each of your targets has circumstance: age, fragility, environment, wanted status, hunted status, in hiding, in prison, etc etc. Each of these is going to have a noteworthy contribution to what is and is not an acceptable, plausible, believable misadventure.

ie: a US pres. being shot is never ever going to look like an accident, while in the current light of the Ukraine and Russia situation, there is a real and daily risk of Ukraine's president being shot. Arguably not a "natural" cause, yet we've decided on a framework referred to as nca, and this is acceptable, believable nca. Context matters.

the biomac is unusually resilient, and can tolerate a lot of stresses and injury before expiration. Hollywood is not at all reflective of reality. However you have the ridiculous power to manifest yourself at will to the interior of a biomac where you could cause trauma without immediate detection. I am going to have to assume that '~3mm you' does not have the same mass as 'regular you', mostly because of the absolute confining limitations. If we're going to accept a 'magical' element, we might as well tweak it in favour of narrative.

just touch on the notion of tiny size yet unchanged mass: Imagine any inanimate object that could reasonably have a mass of ~80kg (hello, USA! that's 177 lbs). I am thinking: a large piece of travel luggage; a large moving box filled with books; 20 gallons of water/milk; All four of the wheels of your car together with the tyre (or maybe just 3 of them, depending on the size); Yourself.
Consider any object which is 2-3 mm in size. Looking around I see a tiny screw, a jumper-pin, a fragment of a broken magnet, a crumb from a cat food biscuit.
Now imagine the combination of the two. The size of this, with the mass of that. Imagine having it placed into your open hand, or dropping on the floor. Imagine dropping it from a height onto a passing truck or bus. Imagine it manifested instantly and without warning, within your shoe, on top of your foot. Within the space of your gut

Methods of 'biomac' tampering which have both severe consequences and plausibility, and should result in misadventure within a respectable time-frame.

An in-exhaustive, unorthodox guide to malevolent leadership removal via oopsie-daisy. Written by Guntram Blohm. Introduction by littlegreenrock. Illustrated by _____.

First edition. 2022. Badwolf press, CA.

- Chapter 1: The brain is a complex ecosystem.

• Intracerebral Hemorrhage
• Ischaemic Stroke
• Carotid artery disease
• Encephalitis
• Spontaneous Intracranial Hypotension

- Chapter 2: Senses are kind of important.

• The Inner Ear: • Acute Hearing Loss, • Vertigo, • Chronic Tinnitus, • Single-sided deafness, or Loss of Stereoscopic Sound.
• Vision and the Eye: • Macular Degradation, • Chorioretinitis and Retinal Atrophy, • Optic Neuritis,

- Chapter 3: Assassination of Character.

• Broca's Aphasia
• Fine Dexterity and Upper Motor Neuron Lesions
• Facial Nerves
• Incontinence

- Chapter 4: Mobility and Locomotion.

• Arms and Interaction
• Legs and mobility
• Hands & Fingers, Dexterity & Shaking
• Toes, and Standing Without Assistance
• Depth Perception, Throwing and Catching

- Chapter 5: Heart and Lungs.

• Practical Cardiopulmonary Overview
• Heart Valves
• Characteristics of Cardiac Muscle Tissue, and Introduction to the ECG
• Pleurisy
• Pneumonia

- Chapter 6: The Other Vital Organs.

• Kidneys
• Liver

- Chapter 7: Categories and Vectors of Infectious Disease

- Chapter 8: Passive and Active Immune System.

• Acute Auto Immune Disorders
• Hyperactive Immune Response and Allergic Reactions

Answer 10

So you're going in with scuba equipment, eh?

Easy! Air embolism

Just release most of the air from the tank in the right place.

I have no idea if this is practical.

Answer 11

Killing is ineffective and always noticeable

Whatever you do, there are big flaws in the plan. First of all, regardless how they die, it'll be noticed. Everyone you deem too evil will die, making a recognisable pattern. Even if you use a different way to kill each of them.

Second of all, killing people doesn't necessarily change things. You are hoping killing them will change anything, but it might actually bolster them.

That is why I propose something different.

What you want is change. Change comes best from within. Three examples. If you would want to get better female rights in Iran you can see that half the country on the street is needed to even consider change. If instead of people in the streets the people in charge die, nothing changes. Someone else will pick up where others left off. Or you have one or more people in charge say there need to be better female rights, then you're getting somewhere.

A solution

To truly reach a solution, not everyone needs to die. You 'just' need to get them to change. Just like the original question this can be done in many ways. An example:

Leave a message to them that they will lose all sense of feeling in their genitals, unless they change their views at least for the public. The first threat is likely ignored, so you teleport in, sever the nerves on the lowest part of the spinal column and give the next message. Now you will have their attention and no one except the targeted person knows that it happened. It also helps that such defects are unlikely to be talked about by either the person, people close to the person or via the medical code of conduct. The next threat will threaten to make a limb useless. Continue until they comply, or if they refuse you kill them. Do the same with the next person until you get someone to comply.

In this example I've immediately gone extreme, but you could start less bad. Making them drunk, cause indigestion, headaches, shortness of breath, stimulate a nerve that causes just the symptoms of a heart attack. The threat of something unseen that can do basically anything with their body, and if you really want to go there the bodies of loved ones, will be enough to persuade most people. The advantage here is that they will likely try to look strong to the public in the meantime. The chances that this becomes public knowledge is reduced.

Conclusion

Killing is in many cases ineffective or just a chance of improvement. Manipulation of the evildoers is where it's at. So long as they are useful they live unharmed. If they are not, they will suffer damage or death. Do this long enough and you will get change without committing to genocide.

Answer 12

Cardiac arrest

Given that you're that small, an efficient way of killing somebody would be to teleport in their heart, and cause it to stop pulsing, thus causing a natural-seeming death. Of course, it looks suspect for a "young" person (20-30 years old) to die in such a way.

corrupt politicians constantly trying to diminish democracy to increase their own power; international corporations ignoring laws; mobsters taking over large parts of the economy because they can

using my power to kill the worst of those people

However, most of the people you plan to kill are quite old, more like 50 or above, so it won't seem that suspect.

Answer 13

Lots of good options here (well... for some uses of the word "good" anyway). I'll add one more idea to complement them all: don't do it the same way with every victim. That will start to be suspicious. But as long as it's a different mechanism every time, you should evade notice for much longer.

Answer 14

Change the cause not the symptom

Well despite your will for a better world with a "Judgedread" style, there is a definition issue in your hypothesis.

Your are looking at the symptome of the problem. You are not looking at the cause.

You will sooner or later die like any "judgedread". The cause here is the "power" not the politicians. Sh**t calls for flies, and honey calls for bees.

The answer to your cause is blindly easy : Kill the power not the people. Give it back to the people.

Democracy is just a diverted way to make people believe they have their destiny in hand. It's easy to corrupt a single person, but a way much harder to corrupt the whole population.

We do have the technology to vote, and discuss subjects without the use of delegates. Everyone should have her word to say. The final vote should be coming from the whole population, and even though those that disagree should still have the right to live on their own perception of reality.

Free yourself from this false believe coming from before may '68 that everything must be in control of a pyramidal power. Read the book from George Orwell "The Animal Farm" and you will understand that forcing people to one way always lead to tyrany.

With such "3mm power" you could, for instance, but not exclusively, like "antman" follow the supposed corrupted politicians secretly to find out their evil activities and reveal them to the world, and joined with advices for a new form of individual respectfull society without power hierarchy, therefore removing any interested for "flies" but only for "bees".

The feather is stronger than the sword...