Taylor - Reverse Engineers Leet's Pistol

It was all I could think about as I stared at the energy pistol in front of me. I'd stolen evidence from a crime scene and I was going to be arrested. I couldn't understand why I'd done it, but the moment I'd seen the weapon sticking out from behind a dumpster, I'd had an uncontrollable impulse to take it, to pull it apart, to understand it. It was almost as though I heard a ticking in the back of my head that was pushing me to do it.

Our tools in the basement were limited, but I'd already used them to pull the gun apart. There had been a battle a day before between the Protectorate and Uber and Leet; how the forensics team had missed the gun I couldn't be sure. It was fairly distant from the main part of the battle, but it didn't impress me with their professionalism. The gun itself had been broken by the application of force.

None of this made sense.

I could follow most of how the gun was designed; for the most part it followed accepted rules of physics. But there were a couple of places that were just wrong. The power source was missing things that should have allowed it to work, and there was a second place where the connections seemed to be out of place. It made my head hurt. It was almost as though those parts had been put there just to screw with me.

Five minutes passed as I just stared.

Finally it occurred to me; the only way these pieces could possibly work was if some of the connections had been shunted off into another dimension. Fixing that would be tricky, and it wouldn't be nearly as elegant looking as what I saw here. It was a crappy job, but there was no way to make any of these repairs neat and elegant without the dimensional shunts.

I even corrected a spot where the insulation was thin. The whole system generated heat, and after too many shots, the wiring would catch fire, setting the entire capacitor on fire. Once that happened, the whole thing would just explode in Leet's hand.

I'd heard that his tech was unstable, but it was hard to believe that he'd make a basic mistake like this. It didn't even take much work; just re-positioning the wiring further away from the power source and improving the insulation. As it had been, I suspected the weapon would have become a bomb after three more shots. If it wasn't for Leet's reputation I'd have assumed that it was a trap for anyone trying to use his tech; the only thing it could be was that he was sloppy. Maybe he had ADHD and wasn't paying proper attention? This sort of thing required a lot of detail work, and a simple mistake could lead to disaster.

It took me two hours to make my repairs. The end result had wires sticking everywhere and looked like crap, but when I lifted it and pointed it at a wall, it blew a hole in the wall the size of my body.

***

Discovery