"Define wrong," Gideon said, already pulling diagnostic feeds before Barry had finished getting the word out.
"My head." Barry pressed the heel of his hand against his temple, and the pressure didn't ease the way a normal headache would have.
It sat there, deep and steady, like something had been switched on behind his eyes and hadn't been switched back off. "It felt like the session was still running even after I shut the device down."
"Vitals are elevated," Gideon said. "Heart rate at one hundred and thirty-eight and climbing. Core temperature up point six degrees. Neither reading matches any previous session at this power setting."
Barry sat very still and made himself breathe slowly, the way he'd trained his body to do under real physical stress, except this wasn't the kind of stress his body knew how to answer.
His heart kept climbing anyway, and no amount of controlled breathing brought it back down.
"Pull my last ten sessions," he said. "Compare vitals against tonight."
The data populated across his display a moment later, and Barry studied it even though his vision kept losing focus at the edges.
Every previous session at seventy percent had produced a mild, predictable spike, heart rate up slightly, temperature steady, resolving within minutes of shutdown. Tonight's numbers didn't resolve.
They kept rising even with the device fully powered down and disconnected.
"This isn't the same kind of reaction," Barry said, mostly to himself. "This isn't the Cap doing something to me. This is my body trying to keep up with something and failing."
"Okay, can you elaborate?" Gideon asked.
Barry closed his eyes and forced the thought through in order, one piece at a time, because rushing it now would only make the pressure behind his eyes worse.
"Every session before tonight raised my baseline a little," he said. "That was the whole design. Permanent gains, no degradation, because the brain adapts to the stimulation instead of just absorbing a temporary spike. But adaptation isn't free. Every neuron that fires faster, every new connection that forms, all of it costs energy. Real, physical, metabolic energy."
"That does make sense," Gideon said.
"For months that cost was small enough that my body could cover it without me even noticing. A little more oxygen, a little more glucose, nothing dramatic." Barry opened his eyes and looked at the climbing numbers again.
"But my baseline's been climbing every single session, and the cost scales with it. Tonight the session didn't fail because the Cap malfunctioned. It failed because my brain tried to draw more energy than the rest of my body could actually supply."
Gideon was quiet for a moment, running something in the background Barry couldn't see.
"Confirmed," Gideon said. "Blood glucose has dropped sharply since the session began, well outside a normal range for this time of night and this level of physical inactivity. Your body appears to have redirected available energy toward cerebral demand at a rate it cannot safely sustain."
Barry let his head fall back against the chair, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt something close to fear about his own plan instead of about the people watching it.
'This isn't a wall I built,' he thought. 'This is a wall my own biology just put up in front of me, and unlike DeVoe's flawed design, there's nothing to fix here. There's nothing wrong with the Cap. The Cap is working exactly the way it was supposed to.'
He forced himself to sit up and think it through properly instead of letting the fear run ahead of the facts.
"Gideon, model it forward. If I kept pushing sessions at this rate, what happens?"
"Multiple possible outcomes," Gideon said. "The most likely is a hard energy deficit during an active session, resulting in loss of consciousness, seizure risk, or cardiac strain depending on how far past capacity the demand goes. A less likely but more severe outcome involves sustained cerebral energy debt causing lasting damage to tissue that cannot recover from prolonged undersupply."
"So the device isn't the problem anymore," Barry said quietly. "I am. My body just doesn't have the infrastructure to keep feeding a brain that keeps getting smarter."
He thought about all the ways a person might normally solve a problem like that.
Better nutrition.
Better cardiovascular conditioning.
Some kind of supplemental energy delivery system built directly into the Cap itself, something that fed the brain more efficiently rather than asking the rest of the body to compensate on its own.
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