A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barricade by John Chu

The barricade ran the length of the frontier. It was transparent and still when calm, but the section before Ritter shimmered. Once coiled as though in tangled skeins, Turbulence now splattered like paint, coating this section of the barricade with patternless splotches of colored light. Generation after generation, engineers had maintained and overhauled the shield that protected civilization against this strange force that destroyed both minds and machines. Ritter’s first posting was supposed to be more maintenance and less overhaul. Unfortunately, the barricade, rather than stilling the Turbulence, twisted and writhed as threads of Turbulence clogged its pistons. Smoke bloomed as the barricade’s flawed machinery destroyed itself.
    Ritter’s partner hung just over the smoke, threads of Turbulence snaking through his dead body. He’d decided to show Ritter, the new academy graduate, how engineers really worked. But the barricade was malfunctioning, not just broken down. It would need a new design to account for an attack mode that Turbulence had never before exhibited, not merely its stripped gears replaced, but the seasoned engineer had refused to listen. The blaze of Turbulence that leaked through hadn’t taken more than few seconds to destroy his mind.
    Ritter shot a distress flare. It carved a thick spiral in the air as it soared. Help would arrive sooner or later.
    A faint whine echoed in his head. A cart was trundling toward him from the other side of the barricade. He sensed it as clearly as if it were right in front of him. Its motor was clanging itself to pieces, its throttle was stuck open, and its steering had seized. In minutes, the cart would plunge straight into Turbulence and its driver could do little about it.
    Ritter threw himself onto the barricade. His hands clutched a cracked, invisible girder. It tossed him back and forth like a banner in a storm. He imagined a tarp, the equations for which Father had drilled into him when he was six. It unfurled over this section of the barricade, its elegant curves guiding Turbulence toward adjoining sections. Vast multicolored plumes parted, rushing along the tarp to areas of the frontier where Ritter hoped the barricade was still in working order.
    Ritter’s section calmed down. His partner, no longer an engineer, fell through the barricade. The dead body splayed on the ground like a pile of broken struts.
    In Ritter’s mind, the barricade felt like a palimpsest. His sense of the archivist who drove the cart and the feral library that trailed it bled through in all the wrong places. Ritter recognized the archivist. When Ritter was a child, Deck’s job was to shepherd a library from camp to camp along the barricade. Deck shared Father’s tent whenever his duties took him to Camp Terminus.
    For Ritter, telepathy was simultaneously a gift and a curse. The gift was that Ritter could know that Deck had aimed the now-uncontrollable cart at Ritter, confident that Ritter would save him somehow. The curse of telepathy was that Ritter couldn’t tell what lay just over his own head. Echoes of shelves on the approaching library’s giant book walls seemed like the barricade’s girders. A myriad of small shelves of Deck’s mind revolved around each other in curves that soared through dozens of dimensions. They seemed to entwine the machine that surrounded Ritter like the nest of tubing that connected the pistons to the compressors. He’d never met another engineer who had to put up with the chaos of minds interfering with the sense of machines in their heads.
    Creating a machine was like working out subtle mathematical analyses while hoisting unbalanced boulders into their proper places. Father could imagine vast, complicated designs outright. Everyone else imagined parts into reality and then hefted into place. Crenels deepened on gears Ritter imagined into tiny battlements. Cams smoothed into pleasing ovoids. He mated