Elsewhere, satellites are set for installation above Velgarth.

That's an intriguing way to look at it. And people can morph off brain damage, as long as they're still able to concentrate enough to morph at all, which means the morph technology isn't just yoinking their actual brain into z-space, or even copying it each time and rebuilding it; it can instead be rebuilt from some sort of earlier template? Though he was also able to morph off his injuries when he had been injured before being given morph at all, so Leareth is now pretty confused about how this works. Anyway it seems like from one angle, demorphing is just forming a construct-body complete with physically instantiated brain, from that template, and so if they know what 'format' that template is in while someone is in morph, they'll know how a backup would have to be formatted?

Leareth gives the go-ahead for the satellite installation, and asks his staff on Velgarth to pass a message to him immediately if anything odd happens. He's not that hard to reach and can be anywhere he wants fairly promptly with a Gate, and it's not like there's much he can personally do to hold off god-responses if he's physically there. In fact, there's some argument that he shouldn't risk going to Velgarth at all until they know the outcome here, since the gods seem to have a grudge against him personally. 

Morph's original purpose was healing already-sustained injuries, actually! It seemed tragic how there were so many brave warriors condemned to live out the rest of their lives in solitude because they'd been injured in the war, and someone came up with the idea that you could carefully copy over as much of them as possible and supplement the rest with a healthy Andalite construct-body. If he'd taken enough brain damage it would've been filling in with more from the human he first acquired and that might actually have had lasting personality effects but a lot of brain damage is straightforward 'the cells are there, but they are dead' and morph is reasonably intelligent about the best replacement for that being 'the cells are there, but they are alive'. It might actually be helpful for him to learn the history of morph, like most complex engineering projects it's layer after layer of contingency and temporary-workaround and fix to a problem created by the last fix.

The satellites go up.

Interesting! Leareth will definitely look at the history of morph, this seems like it could give him a much better idea of how the process is put together and why. 

Leareth gets some messages from Velgarth. Nothing is on fire or exploding and no one is being assassinated? There are scattered reports of priests of various gods having concerning suspected-Foresight dreams but they're very vague. Doesn't seem like there's any indication for him to come across now. 

...

A week after the satellite installation, Alloran receives a letter from the King's Own Herald Tantras and the Groveborn Taver (dictated by his Chosen). 

All the Companions are suddenly having very confusing Foresight-y feelings. Which seem to be conflicting? They are with no particular pattern feeling VERY DOOMY, or wary-but-curious, and sometimes both at the same time?? Also all the long-range Foreseers are suddenly reporting extremely vague but negative-seeming visions. King Randale is aware that Leareth was scheduled to have satellites put up around now but the Companions can't tell if their sudden bad feelings are at all related to that. Tantras and Taver want to know if Alloran is aware of any other plans in the Velgarth region???

Morph started out as a setup to let injured Andalites shift into uninjured Andalite construct-bodies. The shift was meant to be permanent. Then they worked out how to shift to another Andalite construct-body and then back to your own healthy body. Then they noticed this had potential espionage implications and threw an extraordinary thousand-person ten-year research effort at getting it to work with aliens. Then it was the case that being nothlit in a body other than that of another Andalite just killed you. Then they made tweaks so being nothlit in any kind of intelligent alien was survivable. Then they made all of the changes that made being a nothlit survivable regardless. At that point a research team was set to figuring out how to hyperspace jump in morph, so that Andalites could be smuggled aboard enemy ships or crowd into ships of their own in brief emergency situations, and then how to make hyperspace jumps not break the extremely fragile nothlit setup. There are copious notes on all of it but the resulting product is definitely a mess and some people talk aspirationally about starting over from first principles and building a less kludgy form of morph. 

Alloran replies immediately to the letter. The only plans widely known on the Andalite planet are the plan to put up satellites, which by local reporting went as intended; Leareth is to Alloran's knowledge working on ending death right now, which seems like it might be something the Velgarth future would be very affected by, but the timing makes it likelier they're reacting to the satellites. Does Foresight use some of the same bandwidth as satellite internet or something? None of the Andalites who have morphed it have noticed any problems.

Somehow they had received word from Vanyel that Leareth was working on various aspects of morph research but not that he was ENDING DEATH, that seems like a really big deal! Anyway they don't know if Foresight uses the same whatever-that-word-means as satellite internet, which it's also the case that no one in Valdemar really understands what it is. They're grateful for his prompt reply. So far it seems like nothing actually bad has happened? Just people having feelings or dreams that bad things might happen? It's really unclear how to respond to that. They'll send him another letter if anything else happens. 

He writes them a very detailed explanation of satellite internet and how it works, in case this is helpful. Probably it was not included in the initial Andalite delivery of the satellites because Andalites seem to be under the impression that Velgarth is low-tech on purpose, an impression he suspects Leareth encouraged so that people would not decide that the law of Seerow's Kindness applied to activity on Velgarth. (Alloran personally feels that it could certainly have been argued it was a mistake to let Leareth into the galaxy but having done that it would be a mistake to try to otherwise throttle humans on Velgarth. And Leareth defeated the Yeerks and their evil leaders have been executed and so probably it was not a mistake, whether or not he ends up figuring out how to end death.)

Leareth gets a message relayed via Vanyel saying the same thing. His reply says to keep watching the situation because it's also unclear to him what else there is to do. 

On the morph research front: the current project is pretty different from existing morph, if anything it's most similar to the original basic injury-repair morph, and it doesn't need to meet any of the requirements like lasting more than an hour or handling multiple morphs in both directions, so it might be a good place to build something from first principles? Certainly it'll make it easier for his work on this if the setup is less complicated and full of layers of fixes, he had to do so much trial and error on the nothlit work because there was just too much complexity in the system to predict how it would behave in weird edge cases. 

The Andalite engineers are enthusiastic fans of starting over from first principles for this rather than building on the existing messy system. They have twelve different proposals already for how best to do morph when it's done from first principles. 

The Electorate votes to require everybody in the military or the reserves and everybody who is the legal guardian of another Andalite to get a brain scan in the next year. Funding is authorized for this. (Matirin translates: those are the only people they have the authority to require this of, but it establishes that everybody ought to do it, which will get nearly everybody else too.)

[You ought to pick a new name] Cayaldwin writes Mhalir one day while he's working.

[Oh. That is a good point.] 

[I suppose Leareth chooses a new name in each time so it would even be...traditional, in a sense.] 

He thinks. 

[...I am struggling to come up with any ideas. Yeerk names are not unique, they come with additional specifying numbers. Though most of my birthing group was left behind on the homeworld, so I have been the only Mhalir for most of the war.] 

[I guess it probably makes sense to have a Yeerk name if you're going to have a Yeerk body]

[Are you? We could probably make you something else instead if you'd rather]

[Hmm] 

[I - had not considered being something else.]

[I want to have the ability to work as a Yeerk in your head, as I - as the other me did before.]

[I suppose if you are willing to give me morph in the new body, I could do that from any base body.]

[Would the brain mapping still work? I am not sure how one even goes about turning a Yeerk brain emulation into a human physical brain, our brains are laid out very differently!] 

[I'm not sure.]

[It might not work at all and it might end up more like a Yeerk morphed human]

[Than a native human]

[I think it'd be more complicated but if you want I can work on it for a week and figure out how much more complicated]

[I suppose there would be advantages to being human. Leareth could claim I was from his organization in Velgarth and nobody would ask questions.] 

[...If I could be a Gifted human I would like that very much.] 

[Gifts are additionally complicated but if you have morph you could morph them and have them almost all the time]

[True.]

[The human body is more flexible than a Yeerk one in some ways. I would not need to visit the pool every three days, for example.]

[And no one would find you even if they eventually thought to look.]

[I can give it a try but the failure mode is probably that your brain expressed in a human brain doesn't work very well.]

[Noted. I - suppose I am willing for you to try with a different copy of me and if it does not work well we can kill that copy.] 

Probably a lot of people would be more uneasy about this than he is, but it seems like it's at least worth testing if they can make this work. 

[We could also do an Andalite if you wanted]

[I assume Yeerks feel about Andalites about the way Andalites feel about Yeerks but Leareth liked it]

[I understand why Leareth likes the Andalite form. It is a very sensible body plan.] 

[...I am not sure how I feel about it being my base form.] 

[I assume it would be more difficult to suddenly appear as an Andalite with no past life history and not have this raise suspicions?] 

[Matirin could probably finagle it but it would definitely take finagling]

[Matirin spends all his time on that stuff though]

[I do not want to put more of it on his plate without a good reason, then, and I do not think I have a good enough reason to prefer Andalite over human as a base form. Also I am told humans have better morph endurance, which is a significant advantage.] 

[That makes sense]