Barry arrived at the secondary facility at six fifty-three AM.
The building sat in an unremarkable section of the industrial district. Three floors. Concrete exterior. The kind of structure that blended into the background of any city and attracted attention from nobody.
From the outside it looked like a mid-sized storage unit belonging to some forgettable logistics company.
From the inside it was the most sophisticated private research facility in Central City.
He badged through the outer door. Then the inner one. Then descended to the basement level where his real work lived.
The lights came on automatically. He walked past the equipment lining the walls toward the large cordoned section at the center of the space where the Chamber stood under construction.
It dominated the room even unfinished. Ten feet tall. Six feet wide. Transparent panels revealing the complex internal architecture he'd spent months designing and refining.
Electromagnetic coil arrays in various stages of installation. Neural interface mounting systems positioned at precise angles. Biometric monitoring nodes distributed throughout the interior framework.
Not operational. Not yet. Not even close to the final stage.
The Chamber wasn't something Barry would simply switch on one day and step into. It was designed around a single specific event. The particle accelerator explosion.
When that happened, dark matter and dimensional energy would flood across Central City in a wave. A fixed point in the timeline. Inevitable and uncontrollable by anyone.
Except Barry intended to control his exposure to it completely.
The Chamber would amplify and direct that energy. Channel it through seven specifically tuned integration systems simultaneously. Rather than being struck randomly the way every other meta-human would be, Barry would absorb it deliberately. Optimally. In a configuration he'd calculated down to the molecular level.
Similar in principle to what DeVoe had done in the original timeline. DeVoe had used the accelerator explosion to supercharge his Thinking Cap rather than waiting for the enhancement to degrade naturally. He'd turned a random event into a precise tool.
Barry was doing the same thing. But with seven variables instead of one. And with four years of preparation instead of none.
Right now though, the Chamber was weeks away from having its basic framework completed. Months away from calibration. And the particle accelerator itself was still twelve months from launch.
What Barry was doing today was different. Smaller.
Along the left wall of the facility, he'd set up a separate experimental station. A preliminary replication array.
Equipment designed to produce a controlled miniature version of dark matter interaction at scales small enough to test without risking the Chamber's development timeline.
He pulled up the diagnostic report on his tablet. The issue the team had flagged showed up clearly.
The biometric resonance in the lower interaction field was reading 4.3% below threshold. The kind of variance that looked minor on a summary report.
Barry didn't look at summary reports. He connected directly to the raw data and pulled everything. Every reading from every sensor over the previous seventy-two hours.
He read it without moving for three minutes.
Then he crouched down and examined the lower field generator from a different angle.
The calibration reading was a symptom. Underneath it was a resonance interference pattern developing between two specific field generators that weren't designed to interact at higher power levels.
At current test settings the interference was invisible. Below any detection threshold the automated systems would flag.
But Barry was running these small-scale experiments precisely to find problems like this.
Because what happened at small scale informed what would happen at full scale. And at full scale, during the actual transformation, with particle accelerator dark matter flooding through that interference pattern, the feedback would amplify catastrophically.
Barry sat on the floor of the facility and looked at the experimental array for a while.
He'd almost missed it. If the biometric reading had been 3% off instead of 4.3%, the automated system wouldn't have flagged it at all.
He'd have kept running experiments with a flaw in the foundation. And when he eventually scaled up to the real thing, on the day that actually mattered, he might not have known until it was too late.
The transformation wasn't something you survived if the preparation wasn't perfect.
He stood up. Went to his workstation. Started redesigning the field generator positioning.
The fix required rerouting four connection points and installing isolation buffers between the two problematic generators.
Once you understood the problem, the solution was straightforward. But precision mattered. The buffer placement had to be exact to the millimeter or it shifted the interference rather than eliminating it.
Barry worked steadily for two hours. Quiet. Focused. No music or background noise. Just the problem and the tools and his hands.
When he ran the diagnostic again, every reading came back clean.
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