A curious tradition has developed on Balaro, a minor world in the galactic Imperioum. It is a world chock-full of cybernetically enhanced people, with nearly all of its citizens technologically improved in one way or another. Many of these enhancements are physical, simple improvements to physical strength or health, but nearly all of them feature some form of neural implant.
A small group of friends was the first to start the trend. On the first day of the fourth major subdivision of the solar year, the six of them docked a program in their implants. If they said anything that they knew to be a lie, a small amount of money would be immediately wired to each of their friends. The first year, it was a meager 15 credits; by the sixth year of keeping up the trend, it had skyrocketed to an impressive 1600. Somewhere in the third year they’d realized that the cash punishment wasn’t really that important, so the numbers kept going up: the real punishment, after all, was all of your friends knowing for a fact that you lied.
It was after this sixth year, when one of the less fiscally-sound friends had to confess an affair to his wife, when the trend caught on with a broader audience. Their shoddy little lie detector program spread like wildfire, and nearly half of Balaro had it docked by next year’s Day of Truth.
Of course, the punishment had escalated as it spread around the world. Initially, it was just the number of credits going up and up and up; but a few days before the festivities, someone pushed one final change to the program. If you lied, it spun up a cruel little infinite loop, chugging more and more system memory until the entire chip burnt itself out. This, invariably, killed the person the chip was installed in.
On the first Day of Truth, nearly 6% of the population of Balaro died to their implants. For many of these people, it was an accident: people often lie throughout the day, constantly uttering those inconsequential and untrue nothings that help society function. But for plenty of others, it was deliberate, it was knowing that you would rather be dead than have your spouse, your friends, your family, know the truth about you.
On the second Day of Truth, only a total of 38 people died from their implants. It was a day spent almost entirely in silence, in deliberately avoiding speaking so that nobody could ask the difficult (and now, potentially lethal) questions.
As the Day of Truth kept its hold on the culture of Balaro, these numbers evened out over time. Some years had more liars, many years fewer. They kept it around because, frankly, they liked it. There is a lot of value in knowing, even for a single day, that anyone you meet must be telling you the truth. All compliments are genuine, all confessions are true, all vehement denials are the real sequence of events.
It never caught on in the rest of the Imperioum, though. Partially because there are far fewer cybernetically-enhanced people across other Imperial systems, but mostly because no individual found the risks to themselves worth the knowledge of other people’s truths.