Melody reaches for him. :Are you all right?: 

:I - I'm not sure - need a moment...: 

Vanyel closes his eyes, rubs his temples, rolls his neck from side to side a little. 

:- I think I'm all right, but - gods, that's weird. It's like - when I expect it to hurt, it doesn't really, but it's...a bit like I'm reaching to do something without thinking about it, and instead of it working, I...bounce off?: He scrunches up his face. :It reminds me of the thing in dreams sometimes, where you're falling asleep and sort of half-dreaming walking, but then you trip and wake up? Except if the ground were springy or bouncy, so it doesn't hurt: 

Melody makes a sympathetic expression at him. :That does sound very odd! Is it unpleasant?: 

:It's a lot less unpleasant than how it felt before?: 

Vanyel shrugs, half turning away with his eyes on the ground. :I should do something else that isn't poking at it on purpose: 

:Mmm. It's reversible, and it's not setting off any other cascading changes, so I think we can let it sit for a while. Maybe you could have a conversation with Lissa about something innocuous for a while: 

Lissa stands up. "Van, I'm going to get you something to eat, and then I can - tell you gossip about Horn, I guess?" 

Vanyel nods without looking at her.

Yfandes lifts her head. :It's not hurting him: she says to Thellim and Melody, gratitude washing through her mindvoice. :Or, well, vastly less. Thank you - thank you so much...: 

:You're welcome: Melody resettles herself, adjusting the sacks she's using as a backrest. :Thellim, why don't we have a look at the bigger-scale now, see what's changed: She offers her mental hands again, pulling Thellim back into close rapport, and then directs her Sight up-and-out, refocusing on her own default high-level tapestry picture of Vanyel's mind. 

The hole is still there. It's not smaller, or really any less disruptive to the torn-out sections of the tapestry pattern, but...something is pervasively different. Less in the purely structural elements visible at this highest level, and more in the - forces acting on them? 

The sense of a sucking vacuum pulling Vanyel's entire mind toward the broken lifebond, of a bottomless gravitational pit in the inky dark center, is mostly gone. It's still a hole. But it's only a hole, now. 

That's a big change they made by editing a low-level neural object they didn't understand.  It looks much more dramatic from Melody's cognitive-functional perspective than from Thellim's attempt to view the low-level code.  Thellim's paradigm says that the behavior of the whole program is allowed to change when you edit one line and that edit just looks like a one-line edit; Melody's paradigm, apparently, shows the actual degree of change.

On the one hand, it definitely looks better.  The giant sucking void is now just a giant nonsucking void, which, on the face of it, would seem like a good thing.  But Thellim is also feeling increasingly aware that she and Melody did that in sort of a hurry, and they should have maybe paused for five minutes while Thellim tried to list out things that might possibly go wrong.  Now she's staring at the drastically changed mindscape and trying to think of things that might go wrong with it, which she really should have tried to think of earlier; and this is a predictable update that she could have foreseen herself making if she'd visualized out the concrete future in advance.

It's all the more embarrassing because this is exactly the kind of thing that protagonists do in cliched young-adult novels.  Like, oh, say, for example, the legendary popcorn series Science Maniac Verrez.  Right about now would be when Verrez realized yet again that he just did something incredibly stupid and that the facts didn't match the conclusions he'd jumped to.  (Though it wouldn't always end in catastrophe for Verrez, even in fiction, lest the story teach the false moral that reality runs sufficiently on narrative logic to be that reliable about punishing errors...)

:It... looks good to me?  But I have no absolute-noncomparative-advantage in interpreting minds at this scale, Melody, if there isn't some neuroscience trick or computerlogic trick I can throw at things.  The macro tapestry is your own domain-of-accumulated-expertise.:  Thellim is trying to figure out what she might have missed, but all that's coming to mind are very abstract and general forms of doom.  :I suppose - Vanyel's mind would have been in rough equilibrium with itself before, changing only slowly, and then we made this huge change and now it's out of equilibrium and there could be rapid changes incoming.  Do you see anything like that looks like it might... go boing... now that we released the forces previously pulling on it?  Especially if it's a bad boing rather than a good boing?:

:...It does look better. I think. It's not like I've ever tried to deal with this problem before. I - wouldn't be surprised if there are more ripples that haven't happened yet? I can make a guess from this angle, even - there's that area which has been sort of indirectly half blocked off because most paths to it run near the lifebond and were getting sort of pulled in, but it's not pulling anymore... I don't know Vanyel well enough to even guess at what that would feel like to him, though: 

Her expression is calm and pleasant, but her mindvoice is a little worried. 

:I suppose the key question here is whether Vanyel seems likely to self-harm.  I don't think that's what somebody ought to do, after being relieved of constant pain, but - I'm not actually a Mindhealer and have no actual patient experience.:

:It's not my first guess of what he'd do! But, again, I barely know him. Yfandes would have a better sense...: A sense of mental frowning, which Melody somehow keeps from showing on her face at all. :Though I don't love the part where we keep talking to her behind his back. Heralds and Companions sometimes tend to think of themselves as a unit, but they're still separate people and it's his mind I'm mucking around in, not hers: 

Vanyel is eating a piece of bread with cheese that Lissa brought him, and listening - or at least giving the outer appearance of listening - to her chattering out loud to him about her favourite cook from the Horn inn. He looks less like someone forcing himself to eat against great reluctance, but he does seem...distracted, or distant, like he's not actually paying attention to either the food or the conversation. 

:It's not nice, no.  But I haven't thought of a better option yet?  Where I come from, it'd be understood that the Mindhealer-equivalent person might talk to your relatives or friends about you, and because that was understood, it wouldn't come as a surprise betrayal.  We did tell Vanyel we might talk to Yfandes or Lissa?  I guess that doesn't mean Vanyel has to like it.  But I still don't see better options.:

Thellim takes another look at the macro tapestry, which she can't make heads or tails of, except when Melody is paying attention to something, and then Thellim mostly doesn't understand it anyways.  :Can we try to look at the thread we changed, and its immediate surroundings, again?  I should have thought of this earlier, but we should try to see if that thread or anything connected to it was doing anything else we can understand, besides looping lifebond errors.:

:Yes, of course. I think I might need your help to find it again, though, I still don't quite have my head around what you were 'looking for': 

Melody opens her shields a little wider, offering Thellim control of her Sight. 

Well the problem there is that the thread which got cut no longer matches the loops Thellim was searching for.

...Can she just scan for stuff in Vanyel's mind that got Mindhealed within the last few minutes?  Places that had previously been Mindhealed looked distinct to Melody; and if objects in the brain can be marked as modified, it would be only natural for them to have tiny timestamps showing how recently they were modified.

It seems like she can, but it's not immediately helpful about the scale, and is showing her - not the high-level overall impression, but not anything recognizable as the thread from before either, it's some sort of intermediate-scale view, that still has tapestry-metaphor threads.

The trailing ends aren't exactly woven back into the pattern, but the ends that used to be frayed and disintegrating, constantly under strain, are now...no, not exactly tied off or snipped clean, the metaphor is almost more that they're wet, in the particular way that wetting a cut thread can smooth and weight down the end to make it easier to thread through a needle. (That observation is very filtered through Melody.) 

:Melody, I'll try something more like my perspective after this, but I think we're - near where the thread was, as seen from your perspective on things.  Can you look around here for anything that you can understand?  Or for that matter, anything that led back into the healthy parts of Vanyel's mind, or would have led there before we changed things?:

:I need to stare at it awhile longer to really make sense of it, I think. I...don't see anything that obviously would've led back to the healthy parts of his mind before but doesn't now. There are some links back - mostly on the emotion-layer, underneath: and she steers her Sight somehow down-and-through the tapestry, to an underside fuzzy with thread-linkages, like the backside of an embroidered cloth (again, this particular observation-metaphor is entirely coming from Melody, along with her sense that these represent the sorts of implicit emotional associations that people often aren't consciously aware of.) 

:There are links back and forth between most things, though, that's common. I don't think we cut anything. Or...even moved it, much, from this perspective. But whatever we changed, it...looks a lot less likely to unravel more under stress. I don't know if it'll do something else instead, though. Probably if so it'll still be less bad?: 

All right, deep breath, try to shift this to a more codewise/neural-substrate perspective.  Thellim is looking for a recently modified bit of neural substrate that had execution pathways leading to it from the dark void, and which would, if reverted, have execution pathways going through the dark void.  She'd like to look at that bit of substrate, any other things connected to it, and any other things it would connect to if reverted, with special emphasis on any such things that have execution pathways not going through the dark void... did that work?

It's there! 

Seen in context - from a perspective more like the unconscious-emotions-underside than the obviously visible surface pattern, but not exactly that, some other differently-angled view - it's woven into the surrounding tapestry, a lot of it, often in bizarre ways that make very little topological sense. 

It's a lot to look at, somewhat chaotic to interpret, but Melody's Mindhealing Sight isn't flagging anything with the emphasis of her last query.

:- Huh. I don't think I understand what you're checking right now - can you explain more?: 

:I'm trying to determine whether the thread we found was doing anything else important inside Vanyel's mind, more or less?  I tried to ask the Sight to show me if there were paths going to it, or leading away from it if reactivated, that weren't about the dark void.  It's not showing anything, but I don't know if that means a well-formed query executed successfully and correctly returned a null set, or if my query was malformed or that kind of query doesn't work in general.:

Thellim reflects that she perhaps should have practiced and gotten used to this entirely new development environment while recompiling a cat instead of Vanyel.

:I don't know either, sorry. But, well, on a large scale, as far as I can tell the only changes are the lifebond, and what you're looking at right now isn't the same angle but it feels lifebond-related to me as well: