"...Honestly it does sound pretty excruciating. I'll be much better at teaching your computer a language, probably," and she's pretty curious about how that's even possible so that sounds more interesting. 

Cam starts up a machine learning process on a corpus of everything written in Valdemaran and gives Lissa a computer and shows her how it will present her with phrasings it's unsure about and she can poke the ones that are good and poke this button if they are not good and this other button if they're not exactly wrong but sound weird.

This is actually pretty fun, especially when the wrong or weird phrasings are hilarious. She keeps wanting to read them out loud to Van; she doesn't, though. 

Cam applies himself to the specs for the homemade god.

They're pretty thorough and contain a number of subsections and digressions into theory. 

There are a couple of different main routes that Leareth hasn't fully decided between, though the one initially based off an uploaded and modified human mind is his less preferred option for reasons to do with opaqueness of processes and reflective stability of goals and values under large shifts in total power and multiplanar perceptive ability. (There's an offhand mention in a footnote that Companions and Firecats or Suncats, a Karsite equivalent who act as representatives of Vkandis Sunlord, are probably reincarnated and modified human mind-templates placed in magical bodies.) 

In all cases it's a multi-stage plan, with various tests and checkpoints where it would still be possible to shut down the baby godlet if it starts to seem like a bad idea. (Leareth anticipates having to run the initial stage a few times before getting it right enough to proceed onward; fortunately, it isn't the part with an absurdly high power requirement that can currently only be met via blood-sacrifice). The various scenarios where it could be a bad idea are discussed in detail.

There's some theory behind how to read off what a godlet is thinking when it's, in a sense, living in an extremely different world of being able to perceive every plane at once and also constant Foresight interaction with the past and future. There are notes on the danger of using proxy measurements for goals that may start to diverge once conditions get weird, and notes on avoiding giving the godlet any reason to try to hide what it's thinking because, for example, it doesn't want to be shut down. There's a digression into why getting the right goals and values is really hard actually, because the things that matter for human flourishing are a lot more complicated than they seem on the surface.

There's a lot of theory about how to model cause-and-effect in the scenario of multiple gods interacting with each other when all of them have constant access to Foresight futures. There's math. 

What are the goals and values he's after, though, that's the sticking point.

Leareth isn't sure what the final end state is! The really short simple encapsulation is that he thinks all the sentient beings in existence ought to be free to flourish and improve themselves and go towards what they want, but he thinks it's an open question what that looks like once all the stupid problems are solved, because this has literally never happened before. He's hoping a god can help everyone resolve confusing ethical questions such as, whether it's the average level of flourishing or the total amount multiplied across number of beings that matters the most, which affects how high a priority it is to try to get off the planet and expand to the other worlds he's pretty sure are out there and reachable by magic in theory. Also he's not sure if a world where everyone actually has the autonomy to pursue what they want without material scarcity would still involve hard-to-resolve interpersonal conflicts, and what to do about this – there's probably a 'free to pursue your flourishing except that you can't kill other people or destroy their stuff or prevent them from pursuing their flourishing' in there, which a god could maybe help administrate somehow. That being said, if they can get to a state where people actually have the space and time and resources to focus on this for a nice long time, it seems possible that they can eventually resolve thorny ethical questions as a civilization without directly needing a god's help. 

There are some prerequisites to these even being the important questions, though, such as 'no one is starving' and 'no one has to do constant backbreaking work with no slack in order to not starve', going up to 'scarcity of resources isn't particularly a limitation anymore'. Leareth doesn't so much need a god's help with this, as need a god's help to negotiate with the existing gods on their own level, figure out what sort of problem they have with this concept, and get them to stop interfering, though he certainly hopes a cooperative god can help solve the stupid problems faster and maybe without all the intervening steps that require decreasing people's freedom and autonomy because they're currently doing dumb harmful things with it (or, well, sometimes murdering some current people for blood-power in the name of solving things for future people). The list goes on to cover 'no group of people and all their descendants are bound in a pact with an existing god that forces them to do a particular thing forever' and 'no existential threats on the horizon' (there's some sort of centuries-from-now cataclysmic event that he's pretty worried about, which isn't described in detail), and go up to 'death is optional'. Leareth thinks this ought to be feasible via modifying the current afterlife-and-reincarnation situation to be less lossy and allow preservation of memories and sense-of-self across different bodies, if a god was willing to prioritize this.

There are probably still a lot of hard questions at that point, but it's an alien enough world from the current one that Leareth is hesitant to speculate on what the next improvements would be. He isn't a god, after all. 

"Okay... uh, Leareth thinks Companions might be reincarnated and modified human souls but I don't know if that gets us anywhere."

"...Huh, what?" Lissa's pretty absorbed in teaching Cam's computer how to speak – well, read – Valdemaran. "Sorry. I, um," she scrunches up her whole face, "I guess it depends what the modifications are?" Van is the one who's good at reasoning about this sort of topic, not her, damn it. "I mean, the thing Yfandes just did, it'd be sort of confusing if a human did it, so probably the modification has something to do with it, right?" She trails off, droops. "I still don't know if that gets us anywhere though. It's not like we can undo it." 

"Yeah, it doesn't seem intrinsically helpful, but it is interesting and I can maybe check." Former human body of Yfandes, plasticized model: yea or nay?

Yea! Formerly human Yfandes is a dark-haired woman who looks to be in her forties or fifties, wearing a somewhat different style of Heralds' Whites than Vanyel's. 

Lissa perches on the arm of the sofa where Vanyel is still thoroughly asleep, worriedly stroking his hair. "I mean, Yfandes didn't repudiate him," she says eventually. "That's...got to mean something? She just stormed out. Maybe all she needs is space to calm down? If she was literally unbreakably mind-controlled into repudiating him over this then she would've done it right away, surely." 

"That sounds probably right if it was, uh, tidy mind control? It might not be. She does appear to be a reincarnated human." He holds up the model.

"Huh! Bizarre. I wonder why they never tell anyone?" Lissa looks at the model some more. "I mean, maybe it'd ruin their reputation as these really wise beings who know what's best. What do you think, um, untidy mind control could look like?" 

"She might not remember? Uh, remember how Arda species have unbreakable oaths, those are a little gameable with exact words and manipulating your own state of information but ultimately they don't admit of breakage outright. She could be having some really unpleasant series of inferences beating their way through her head till she has no choices left. I don't specifically expect that but it's in possibility space."

Lissa blinks a bit at the beginning of the sentence (she's briefly confused whether Cam means Yfandes won't remember a key fact about Arda oaths but probably he means she might not remember being human).

When he's done, she turns away for a while; when she looks back, she's on the edge of tears. 

"Is there anything we can do about it?" she says plaintively. "I don't – he's not going to be all right if she repudiates him, it'll break his mind, I've read about repudiations happening and it's really bad. Can Arda oaths be broken by someone else from the outside? Can a god break them if you talk them into it? Could we – all right, I don't know that it's better if we go find her and you keep her unconscious forever so she can't have unpleasant inferences but I don't know that it's worse either. Cam, I'm really scared, I...don't want this to be what's happening...and I don't know what to do–"

"...there's tricks you can do with the chipped species but she isn't chipped. Uh, I don't know anything about horse medicine and she isn't even actually a horse. I could try to find her, the yard is space warped so even though she's been out a while I could maybe see her from the air? I could bring you if I make a shuttle."

"Hmm. I...guess it could help to talk to her just to find out what's going on? I, um, I don't know that I want to leave Van unsupervised though and it seems like a bad idea to take him any closer to her since she specifically asked us not to let him go after her." 

"And you can't fly a shuttle and she doesn't like me much."

Lissa jumps up and starts pacing, gnawing her fingernail. "Damn it I wish I knew if this was the kind of emergency where it's worth doing something costly and irreversible right now or if it's safe to sit on it. I would just go get Savil and have her go with you, she's a Herald at least, but Van did specifically request not that and also, um, I think he has a point that it'd take a while for her to get past the yelling to the point where she'd actually help us... Gods, I would almost suggest getting Leareth but, er, I think Yfandes likes him even less, and it'd be putting a lot of trust in him to leave him here watching Van, I don't know how sketchy he seems after you read his god-specs? Um, is there literally anyone else in here we can pull in for help?" 

"I could get an Elf."

"Oh! If you can do that then – hmm, if you know any Elves who're really good with people, that could be a better idea than me talking to her. I'm actually really bad at delicate conversations and I'm kind of furious with her right now for being horrible to my brother, I could maybe keep a lid on it but I think she'd be able to tell." 

"Uh, the ones I have with me I don't know all that well."

Lissa seems slightly disappointed but not surprised. “Well, extra pair of hands is better than not having that, we can at least have them stay and watch Van so I can go in the shuttle with you and, er, do my best to talk to her.”

"Oh, I could also remotely pilot the shuttle?"