:All right: Vanyel closes his eyes. :Go ahead: 

:- Well, I don't think we can expect more enthusiasm than that: Melody sends privately to Thellim, and then reaches out to her, offering the tighter rapport of concert-Sight. 

Thellim leans in, as if preparing to match another's movements.

Going along with Melody's Sight with Melody herself steering is a dizzying experience.  Vanyel's tapestry unfolds, seeming both familiar and unfamiliar to Thellim, like a picture she's seen before but with inverted chroma.  Melody's attention moves over it, understanding things that Thellim cannot understand, moving on without stopping for a tiring job of explanation.  It is like - well, it is like being inside somebody else's head as they look over a vast gameboard in a game you don't understand, parsing up the global position into chunks and planning their next moves.

:What's the plan?: Thellim thinks at Melody.

:- I had been planning to sort of - re-weave in the loose threads one by one, so the pathways at least have somewhere to go, it'd be a lot less distorting than an ordinary block... But there's a lot of fine structure I'd have to take into account and...it's not feasible in two candlemarks. Maybe not in twenty candlemarks: 

Thellim is not quite sure what Melody was intending to do - it is spoken in the language of the Mindhealing Gift and maybe of Melody's own personal Gift - but she can understand that the operation would need to be iterated too many times.  Thellim can at least pick up the sense of time from its context and connotations, not precisely measured, but a candlemark seems like it would be around 4 0.25-hour-periods.

:I had more clever-thoughts while you were gone,: Thellim thinks back; the word clever-thought contains the connotations of the many reasons why clever-thoughts are to be distrusted.  :It occurred to me that Mindhealers may usually deal with people who've undergone trauma exceeding their strengths, and they would think in terms of trying to - diminish the amount of pain, help people handle that pain.  Not like... fixing a complicated system that is exhibiting strange behaviors.:  Thellim is trying to avoid throwing unfamiliar concepts like 'debugging' across the link right now.  :There's a saying among the healers of my world that complicated problems come in three varieties, one of which is system attractors.:  It's clear at this level of bandwidth that Melody does not know what a system attractor is either.  Oops.  :Cases where there's 6 things going wrong, no one of which would be fatal alone, all of them subtly feeding into each other.  'Depression' does not name a single thing, the way that a 'cat' is a distinguished kind of animal that only breeds with other cats.  There is not a single species of depression, there is not a central essence to it.  Something goes wrong with somebody's metabolism, they feel tired, they exercise less, they stop seeing their friends, their friend networks don't support them as much, they sleep more poorly that night, they're tired so their tasks feel more painful the next day, they fail at their tasks, they learn that the effort of trying is met only with the pain of failure.  If there's something about the broken lifebond that - causes Vanyel's thoughts to go into a loop of errors - Vanyel strikes me as a very strong person, what with him still being alive, the only known person with a broken lifebond who's still alive.  Maybe Vanyel could handle or learn to handle everything that we think of as ordinary trauma, the pain of Tylendel's loss, the pain of the broken lifebond, and even his thoughts causing errors when he thinks about the lifebond, as long as his thoughts didn't go into a loop of errors and remembered pain.:

:...I - think I followed what you mean. About the - patterns that feed into themselves - like one rock that starts an avalanche, except it also circles back on itself so I guess that metaphor doesn't quite work...: 

She shakes her head a little. :He's incredibly strong, that's for sure. He's spent six months dealing with circumstances that I don't think I could've coped with, and - he's not handling it perfectly but he's handled it at all, this far. And all the years before that. I - there's something driving him and I don't think I understand it, yet, I think it's more than just 'being a Herald' or 'duty to the Kingdom' - more than just Yfandes...:

A mental shrug. :Though that's not the main point here, and not my business anyway if he doesn't want to tell me. Anyway, I think you're right, and just breaking the loop would do a lot, but - I don't know how to do that in a single step either, there are all sorts of pathways that turn his attention toward the broken lifebond: 

Thellim sends back a feeling of playing a dath ilani computer game as a child, complicated systems of wheels and gears and fluids of changing colors where the objective was to fill the goal-cup with blue water, and there would be obvious ways to do it in 20 moves and hidden clever ways to do it in 1 move; although sometimes the minimum was 3, and sometimes there was no easy solution at all, so as not to teach children a wrong lesson about problems always having hidden simple solutions.  :If there are many pathways continuing the loop through where Vanyel focuses his attention, maybe we don't try to interrupt the loop on that step.  We look for the place where we can break the loop with the fewest changes, or the least expensive changes.  That would be the clever-thought, anyways.:

:That would certainly be convenient if it worked! I...don’t know how to look for it with my Sight, though:

:Your Gift is powerful enough to translate strangers' brains for you.  And you can find places you're looking for, somehow, without checking every part of the tapestry that you can see.  I'd imagine it - ought to contain something like a search function - but what we're searching for is - there's an obvious metaphor in my thoughts, but I don't know how to explain -:

Thellim wordlessly requests steering for the perceptual side of Melody's gift, and asks it to - metaphorically speaking, it's okay for the Gift to interpret this as a metaphor rather than literally - distinguish for their attention those portions of tapestry constituting (minimal-sets-of functions that (mutually recurse AND (have execution pathways going through the giant void at the center of Vanyel's mind))).

Wow that feels VERY ODD, though not at all in a bad way; Melody is captivated, in fact. The metaphorical tapestry of Vanyel’s mind blurs, the view of it twists in some way reminiscent of being flipped inside out - dizzying, as her Gift searches for the right angle...

And then clarity, again.

It’s still a tapestry, but they’re seeing a completely different aspect of it; there are loops, like carpet-pile weave, the way that they tangle, and - a structure that wouldn’t actually be physically possible in cloth, a single narrow thread running through or behind or somehow inside all of them...

...And then finding only void and disintegration, and echoing back its failure.

:....This is such a confusing view!: It’s harder to hold focus on, maybe just from unfamiliarity, and threatening to give her a headache.

Thellim leans into the bond more, trying to hold up the part where she maintains the unfamiliar-to-Melody search structure, while still letting Melody look around at things.  It's a more complicated task and a strain for Thellim, but she can handle it, she thinks, Melody is the one who's been doing most of the heavy lifting here.

These search results are also too much to look at, and need to be narrowed.  Thellim puts mental parentheses around the previous metaphorical search term she used, and asks that their foreground attention be focused on those functions that appear in more than one such minimal set of recursive functions; the original search term's results can be relegated to a lesser background emphasis.

The single narrow thread running through everything is much more prominent, now, and some particular stretches of fabric it's embedded in.

This search term is a little harder to hold in mind, but the search results should be a lot easier for Melody to go through.  :Melody, does that thread - make sense to you?  It doesn't make immediate sense to me.:  It's not just a particular spike train, and a significant part of Thellim's focus is now distracted.

:No, I think it’s not just what you were calling a ‘spike train’. It’s larger - no, I’m not sure that’s quite right - it’s a more general kind of pattern than that? It’s...the relationship that makes these loops about the broken lifebond, maybe...?:

Thellim tries transmitting the concept of a lifebond-error-handling function which tries to transmit its result through the lifebond, causing an error which reenters the lifebond-error-handling function.  :Is it - anything like that, maybe?  Did that spark any ideas?:

:Could be? If I understand what you mean by ‘function’ which I’m not sure I do. And from this angle, without actually manipulating it, all I can interpret for sure is that it’s related to both the broken lifebond and the stuck loops:

A pause.

:Meaning I’m not sure what, exactly, it would do if I tried to block it. But I’m quite confident I could undo it if it makes things worse. What do you think?:

Thellim thinks about this for a moment.

They can either spend twenty candlemarks doing much more burdensome and complicated things to Vanyel that they understand; or they can do one allegedly-reversible operation on his brain that, basically, they do not understand at all.

Thellim considers asking the patient for his opinion on this subject.  Even explaining how they found this one thread would - and Vanyel is really not in good shape right now - and she and Melody are essentially the only people who'd understand at all the very small amount of information they have that would go into making this decision - they could ask the Companion but it's not clear that she stands as a guardian to Vanyel in a meaningful sense and there is that whole thing with the mind control plot going on -

:If your Gift is telling you it's reversible, and you've previously always been right about what's reversible, and you've never done a reversible thing that turned out to have an immediate enormous cascade of side effects you couldn't reverse, my sense is that we try blocking this thread and then ask Vanyel what happened.:  Thellim wants to produce a nonsapient-animal-model of broken lifebonds and experiment on it, but she has the sense that the situation between Karse and Valdemar does not allow for that kind of time.  :What was your opinion-that-you-arrived-at-before-you-heard-mine?:

:My worst case scenario is that it causes short term very unpleasant side effects, in which case I instantly put him to sleep and then undo it. I...am very very sure there would be no consequences lasting until tomorrow morning, aside from a distressing memory. My decision would have been to ask him if I can try something with unknown odds of helping but very unlikely to be lastingly-harmful, and go ahead if he agrees. Which I’m pretty sure he will:

:I was also worried we'd lose the thread if we went out of concert-sight, but if you think you can talk to him from inside here, or if you're confident you can find this thread again if we go out and back in - agreed.  Let's do it.:  Knowing what the patient's answer will very likely be, and Vanyel's circumstances, means that the real burden of responsibility for this decision still rests on them; but she can see the ethics in checking anyways.

:I can handle it briefly -with your help focusing on the thread, all I really have to do is maintain my side of the rapport:

And to Vanyel and the others: 

:I want to try something. It may or may not help but either way it’ll help me understand the problem better. I don’t know the exact effects or how it’ll feel; if it makes things worse I’ll undo it immediately, if it’s bad enough I’ll knock you out and then do that. Do I have your permission to try?:

Vanyel starts to answer, then stops and considers it for a much longer thirty seconds or so.

:Yes, you can try:

:Ready?: Melody checks with Thellim. :The change will be straightforward, but I do want your help watching for any other changes that propagate from it, since you seem to understand the structures here better:

She gathers herself.

...And then reaches in with a force that isn’t her hands, pushes something through that seems to soften the thread - and then loops it through itself and knots it off.

Thellim realizes what's going to happen only an instant before it does; all the structures they were looking at drop out of the search results.  Thellim reacts barely fast enough to deliberately refocus her attention on that thread and the structures surrounding it -

:sorry I didn't think fast enough I should have expected that it no longer matches the search we used it's no longer part of a loop:

If any other changes propagated out from that change, Thellim didn't See it while that was going on, unfortunately.  But she does sense that the remaining stretches of fabric that participate in void-entering loops are much fewer, now.

Thellim takes the search term back to any minimal-set of functions going in a loop leading into the void (OR that one thread and its surroundings).  There's some of the tapestry still highlighted, but much less.

:Melody, sorry, I - I don't understand what I'm looking at here, at all, there's far far far too much that my society doesn't know about brains.  Maybe a real neuroscientist in my place would have understood more.  But it does look like we interrupted a whole lot of loops.  I think we just ask Vanyel to try thinking and see how he feels, at this point?:

:Mmm: 

Melody holds rapport with Thellim, but shifts most of her own attention from her Sight - the level of detail interpretable to Thellim immediately drops, though interestingly she can still hold her own attention on it a little. 

:Vanyel? I did it - let me know what you're noticing?: 

:Hmm?: Vanyel shifts, lifts his head. :I - what–: