Reg liked to have a beer when he finished for the evening. Not to get drunk. He wasn’t like his father, who would have a few. Reg stuck to one drink, alone in his shed. He stepped back from his workbench and sipped at the foam. It was good. It was an improvement at least. It was a job-well-done.
His fathers name was Reginald too which made Reg Reginald Junior, an only child – the apple of his mother’s eye. Reginald Senior was always a handy kind of person, doing odd jobs around the house. There was a small blackboard by the fridge and Reg’s mother would scrawl To-Do’s in handwriting that Reg couldn’t make out. His Dad would step back from the new shelf, the plugged leak, or the fresh-bled radiator, sip at the beer foam and suck it from his mustache and look at his job-well-done. He would cross it off the To-Do blackboard. It was up to Reg’s mother to wipe it out. He was always swearing about the person who did the job before him.
‘They’ve bodged this Reg,’ he would say. ‘Bloody useless.’
That’s all life is really. People come along and tear down other people’s work. ‘This is a load of rubbish,’ they’ll say to themselves or anyone in earshot. Then they’ll rebuild it how they think it should be to the best of their limited ability. After they’re done they’ll step back and congratulate themselves on a job-well-done. It’s some kind of psychological tick that makes people look at their own work like that. In an indefinite amount of time someone else will come along and look at it and think they can do it better. That’s all humans are, a load of bodgers besting each other and patting themselves on the back for a job well done. That’s all government is. A new law is a do-it-yourselfer sipping at their beer foam.
But Ulti-gun Mark 4 really was a job-well-done. Reg had really improved firearms with his safety modifications. But then, he would think that. After all, he was just doing what countless other bodgers had done.
Isn’t this how improvements are made, though? He wasn’t like his father. He didn’t bodge things. He was an engineer. He was improving on a flawed design. After his father died, Reg realised that bodged anti-gun laws wouldn’t have saved him. There needed to be a total redesign. That’s what he set out to do.
Four triggers – spaced in such a way that they can’t be operated by one person alone, no matter how they contort themselves. Now the decision to shoot would fall on at least two people, doubling the accountability and halving the chance of itchy trigger finger. ‘Should we shoot,’ would have to be a discussion the operators had before firing. No more rash decisions. That was the first safety feature Reg had come up with.
Then there were what he called the spiked triggers, designed so as to cause the operators pain when pressed. This, again, meant the operators thought twice about firing. In the original design, Ulti-gun Mark 1, they had been actual spikes. However, spikes could be blunted or covered. In Ulti-gun Mark 3 he replaced the spikes with electrified triggers which gave the operators a shock when pressed. Of course, these could just be covered with a bit of insulation tape.
In Mark 4 Reg added a fingerprint sensor to the triggers. Now, any attempt to insulate the electrified triggers would also cover the fingerprint sensors, disabling the Ulti-gun. These fingerprint sensors also served to identify the operators, meaning law enforcement could track down murderers easier.
When Reg told people his father died from suicide people liked to ask ‘were you close?’ or some variation of that question.
‘No,’ was his usual answer.
His father approached parenting like a crack in a plaster wall. He kept slapping filler on without trying to find out why the crack kept getting bigger.
The older Reg got the more he recognised his father in himself. When asked now, Reg would answer, ‘We are basically the same person.’
His father had been painting the back bedroom some shade of white. Reg was fourteen, and he was on his way to tell his Dad off about something.
Sometimes he had the words laid out in his head, and then when he came to put them to air he would stutter gibberish. Sometimes the perfect phrasing would burst from him like a wellspring and leave his father to be the one stuttering.
His father’s knee had streaked a spilled pool of white paint across the floorboards. The shotgun rested between his legs, the barrel on his chest. The upturned paint tin lay next to him. The rest Reg had blocked from his memory.