The end product will be something to behold. 

No doubt it will be used on me the moment its existence becomes public. I tinker away in secrecy, amused that there’s no real way for me to profit from my invention. But that was never the intention was it? It’s a compulsion after all: We are who we are and cannot help our passions nor what we’re drawn to. I remember making an L out of lego bricks in reception, then being told on and having my makeshift gun confiscated.

I havent given the prototype a distinct name as it rightly deserves, but it’s a gun. Of course it’s a gun. When has anything else ever changed the world?

Though the technology has broader implications, none interest me aside from this singular implementation. The concept is simple and once I finalise it, the ensuing deaths will be elegant.

Picture for a moment the usual trajectory of a bullet fired by a gun. It explodes from the nose, rippling through space and tearing through all materials in its path. The entire time it loses speed, arcing down under the weight of gravity until at last it lodges itself into its final location. Glorious, but inelegant all the same. 

And what of all the collateral damage between the gun and target? What of poor aim? Of distance, rendering targets missed or unreachable?

Now imagine a gun which fired bullets directly to a point in space, instead of tracing an arc through it. The target, and only the target, would be killed by the marksman, irrespective of what lay between them and how far. Beautiful. Simple. Drone strikes and snipers have never looked so unsexy.

My gun consist of two parts: a glove and an augmented visor. A perfect synthesis of action and observation. Of thought and execution. The glove functions as control and trigger; the visor displays coordinates in spacetime. You simply navigate through space-points, directing the bullet to when and where it should lodge. Theoretically you could kill a man on another continent yesterday with none the wiser.

That’s what should be possible. My prototypes have killed men living in the past already, dont get me wrong. But as yet the execution remains messy.

The maps do not thread to the endpoint neatly. The bullets in effect still arc a line, only now through a greater range of space and time. They appear and disappear seemingly at random through existence, until they land when and where they ought to. The target still dies of course, but the problem lies in all the collateral deaths along the way. 

As it stands my gun is as much a machine gun as it is a sniper rifle. Doubly inelegant, no less discriminate than a nail bomb. So I tinker away in secrecy. The greatest evidence of my success and genius will be my dying before it can occur.