Kaelik wrote:
Would government agents be sent to shoot him?
Hell no.
Fucking A, Amra's just a crazy conspiracy theorist telling us all that the evil government is not just evil but stupid, and regularly shoots people for no fucking reason.
*sigh* You're wilfully missing the point, I suspect, but I'll bite this once.
Firstly: no reason? Seriously, no reason? You're actually saying that the ability of a person who can pull any secret out of anybody's head is not a good reason for at least some people to want them dead?
Secondly: governments don't have to be evil and stupid to do this. Governments and police forces can, and do, dispatch people who are a threat, but that doesn't even matter because - addressing a point that angelfromanotherpin made earlier - government departments are made up of people. People have secrets. Government departments have secrets from other government departments and people with those deparments have secrets from other people within those departments. I'm not suggesting for a moment that the British Prime Minister, the US President, or a Director of the CIA or MI6 are going to sign an order to have our putative telepath executed. They wouldn't need to, and they wouldn't even need to want for it to happen. All that would be required was for one person who didn't want various things uncovered to tip off the right criminal (or foreign government) organisation that a telepath existed and was going to be used in an operation against them.
Christ, I'm currently living in a country where the government is melting down because Members of Parliament are guilty of wholesale tax evasion and a Brazillian electrician was shot in the face on a train by police because he was "wearing a jacket". It's really not hard to imagine a situation in which someone suffers some sort of tragic accident because it becomes known that they can, on a whim, find out everyone's dirty secrets.
Whereas angelfromanotherpin is quite correct in saying that governments try to get shit that other governments don't have, the governments that don't have that shit either want to take that shit for themselves or - failing that - to eliminate that shit from the game. This is why real, actual spies get killed. This is why we end up with people working on nuclear programmes selling secrets to the other guys. This is why even perfectly ordinary people with no super-powers are kidnapped or killed by opposing governments or criminals when they know something too useful or explosive to let pass.
Like I said before, you only need to kill a guy once. Even if lots and lots of people see the advantage of working with our telepath, they have to succeed at saving the guy's life every time while the folks who want him dead only have to succeed once. There are already plenty of people in this world - from intelligence service agents to Mob informers - for whom security has to be tighter than the proverbial duck's arse because of what they know. In general, the threat to them greatly diminishes once what they know has been deployed in whatever fashion. Although, you know, Litvinenko, Markov, Kostov et al might disagree with that assessment.
A telepath changes that equation. Whereas your average joe can't - embarrassing exceptions like Kim Philby aside - do much more than reveal a snapshot of information on specific and limited topics, a telepathic spy can potentially reveal anything about anything without ever blowing his or her cover. Combined with their ability to effectively ignore all extant security procedures, that makes them a correspondingly high-value target for either acquisition or elimination: by my government, your government, the other guy's government or any number of special-interest groups.
Have you ever in your entire life seen a superhero who could read people's minds but not influence them?
I hate to tell you this matey, but I've actually never in my entire life seen a superhero. Because they are made up. And there are many made-up telepaths who can read minds without influencing them.
Fucking A:
Jedi: Read and Influence
Heroes show: Read and Influence
Brainblaster: Read and Influence
Every fucking Telepath ever: Read and Influence.
You are completely and demonstrably wrong. Betazoids. Novels and short stories by Robert Heinlein, Anne Rice, Iain M. Banks, Alan Burt Akers, Piers Anthony, Sheri Tepper, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey and goodness knows how many others. The trope of characters who can read others' minds and/or telepathically "speak" but can't otherwise influence them is
very well established indeed, and any assertion to the contrary is clearly false.
Having established that, by all means posit telepaths who can not only read minds but influence them as well. But unless you also establish parameters for their abilities there's little point discussing how they could prevent themselves being killed, kidnapped or suffer lifelong incarceration for their own protection once their existence is known. They might be able to, they might not, it all depends on what they can do.