Barry ran through each option carefully, and each one collapsed under the same basic math.
A stronger heart could pump more blood, but not enough more.
Better nutrition could raise available glucose, but not by the order of magnitude the deficit tonight had shown.
None of it closed the gap.
All of it only bought a little more room before the same wall reappeared, closer than before.
'There's exactly one version of me strong enough to feed a brain built to this ceiling,' he thought, 'and that version doesn't exist yet.'
The Chamber's enhanced physiology package had never been just a convenience item on his list, a nice addition layered on top of the real prize.
He'd built the plan around six abilities meant to make the seventh, the Speed Force connection, more stable and more sustainable. He'd never planned for one of those six to become the only thing standing between him and simply being able to keep thinking at all.
"Gideon, log this," Barry said. "Effective immediately, no more active sessions past sixty percent power until further notice. I want daily vitals tracked automatically, and I want a hard alert if my resting heart rate or glucose baseline shifts outside normal range at any point, even outside a session."
"Logged," Gideon said. "Shall I also update the Chamber's design priority list to reflect this development?"
Barry thought about that for a long moment before answering.
"Yes," he said. "Physiology enhancement isn't ability six of seven anymore. It's the one that makes the rest of the plan survivable. Everything else waits on it."
He sat with that for a while, letting the weight of it settle instead of pushing past it the way he usually did with new information.
For the first time since discovering the flaw in the Chamber's field generators, he felt the full size of exactly how much was riding on a single, unrepeatable event he still didn't fully control.
The countdown to the accelerator's launch sat somewhere in the back of his mind the way it always did now, a number that only ever moved in one direction.
He was still turning that thought over when his phone buzzed on the desk beside him. He glanced at it without much interest at first, expecting Cisco or a company notification, and felt something in his chest tighten the moment he read the sender.
It was Caitlin, and the message was short.
Something happened at CCU tonight. You need to see this.
Barry read Caitlin's text twice before he called her instead of texting back, because whatever had happened, it clearly wasn't something she wanted to explain in a few typed lines.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Something happened at CCU tonight," she said, skipping past any greeting. "In the physics building. I don't know all of it yet, but I think you should come see this in person."
"Give me twenty minutes," Barry said, and was already reaching for his jacket before he'd finished saying it.
He drove to STAR Labs instead of the campus itself, since that was where Caitlin had told him to meet her, and found her waiting near the main lab entrance with her arms crossed and her laptop open on the counter beside her, the screen full of local news alerts and a campus safety bulletin.
Cisco was there too, perched on a stool with a pair of headphones hanging around his neck and an old handheld scanner sitting on the counter in front of him, the kind of secondhand police and fire radio you could still buy from a hobbyist shop if you knew where to look.
"Okay, so, don't judge me," Cisco said before Barry had even finished crossing the room, "but I like listening to the scanner sometimes. It's relaxing. Like ambient noise, except occasionally somebody's cat is stuck in a tree."
"Nobody's judging you," Barry said.
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