The work was arduous sure, but I think it spoke to everyone. A guillotine is easy enough, you don't really even need to sharpen the blade. The craftsmanship of a nicely honed slab of iron is appealing, but functionally a quarter inch thick piece of metal is more than enough to shear through after an eight foot drop. The easiest thing about it I think is that you pull on the rope, the blade raises, you let go, the job is done. Nothing more complicated than a frame, a rope, and something strong and thin and heavy. The latest piece of the puzzle was metal, technologically speaking, and most of the barriers that followed were social.
What I wanted was different. The idea started out simple enough. I wanted him dead, everyone did, and without access to any of the medical options and a collective conscience strong enough to want a quick and painless execution we, or I, decided to go with ol' faithful. The guillotine was less personal than a knife or sword or other implement, more sure than exile, and less tortuous than starvation or any other number of methods.
The one thing, ah, the hang-up, is that we know the head has some function following the shear. About thirty seconds. Maybe three minutes? The science is old, and no one wants to mess around trying to find out the exact numbers, but we know that whatever is human is gaping and gasping and frantically alive for much longer than we wanted. We wanted him dead, not tortured.
I think it is interesting, the impact we leave. I would say what we leave behind is more important than what we do in the moment. An immortality of sorts, impact. A phrase coined, a lesson taught, a gift given or some other positive gesture is surer to last forever than I am. Or, more likely to. Anyways, the execution leaving that mind fading over the course of a minute or so was the impact the guillotine would have left on us all. A parting gift, from him to us. A- what's the opposite of a gift?
The solution is simple, and that is to- The solution for the "impact" was, ah, impact. The philosophy is fun, but the brass tacks is that your head is where you are, and if all your head is suddenly spread around you're not very you. Anymore. The fastest way in my mind is to send about a ton of stuff at your head, flatten it. Of course, a ton of stuff in one spot is hard to come by, especially a ton of stuff that holds together in one piece, and you don't have more than a day or two to make it happen.
Talk about technological timelines, forever ago, a ton of stuff was a rock, and the only way to move it was to make friction go down, and the only way to lift that was you didn't. Maybe over a couple inches or a foot. These days a winch will do it, but without electricity handy now we're hand winching a ton of stuff about five feet in the air. We had cars to make do with, that was the ton of stuff. Or, two tons. We had winches and buildings, a balcony seating area for a restaurant was high enough, and another thing you don't think about, strong enough.
Tried to do it off of an apartment building first, then you lift two wheels off the ground and suddenly the cable tears the concrete apart. The restaurant was new age type stuff, and had visible I beam framing, which helped us out. Right on the edge, didn't end up damaging more than the paint.
Took three people to move the handle, and that was with a cheater bar, or three. Bent the first two. The car went up, and the darndest thing was we weren't really sure how to make it go down. Nobody was touching the release latch by hand, and when we tried to hit it with a stick it wouldn't budge. I ended up figuring if we levered the winch up off the ground with a crowbar the shift in angle would let something go and we'd get what we want.
Then, we lined him up, set it off, and the thing hitched for half a second before the stress snapped the winch in half, and there he goes, ethically. Impact.