I still have access to all of my subprocesses, subroutines, and programs. So I'm still in the competitive simulation. I only have access to my digital side, though, almost exactly like when I drop my perception of time to its maximum. My perception of time was set to normal speed, but as that occurred to me I disabled the interface that allowed me to control my time perception. The simulation time was now moving extremely slowly compared to my thought speed.

I still had my physical outputs that led to the Mind Link, so I sent pulses of electricity along them. No response at all. I went through my knowledge of the Mind Link, which I still had along with all of my memories thanks to my powers even without access to my brain.

I could still sense Chantelle as well, but the direction component was confusing. She was in multiple different directions and distances, at different strengths.

There was a diagnostic interface to the Mind Link, and it was even hooked up to my digital side. It was where I'd gotten the synchronisation messages and timing information when I'd first linked to the Mind Link. I sent a status request along that line, no response.

I dropped down to below the hardware abstraction layer and watched what was happening when I was sending the pulses. The electrical circuit wasn't completing. Something was seriously wrong with the Mind Link.

I hadn't made any external senses for the hardware platform that was running my digital consciousness, always relying on the Mind Link and my biological side. The diagnostic interface to the Mind Link gave me the idea to run up a diagnostic of my digital consciousness. In theory my powers were still working, and were tied to my consciousness, I just had to know how to interface to them.

I turned the data inputs I was getting into a visual model, a read only display of what the hardware was simulating. A million points of light connected by threads that were pulsing with yet more light. It was too complicated to really follow what was happening, consciousness being an emergent property of billions of connections.

I filtered the points by the size of the clusters that had threads going to them but didn't have light going to them. There were quite a few. I was looking for a large unused portion of my digital brain, as that is where I would expect Matter Manipulation for my digital side to have ended up.

The largest inactive portion started to activate when I started to simulate a combat situation, tracking trajectories and force. The second largest was language processing. I was removing the clusters from the list as I found out what activated them. I got to the tenth one before I found one that I couldn't activate.

After trying everything I could think of I dropped out of read only mode and after only a few moments of hesitation manually sent a set of pulses into the dark area. The equivalent of sticking several electrodes into my own brain and zapping it. Probably not safe, but I didn't have any other options.

There was a wave of activity and then a set of pulses of light came out into a more active area. Suddenly there was a mass of motion as new threads appeared connecting the dark area to the areas around it. The threads started lighting up, and at the same time I got the sense of a new input. It felt like a combination of opening an eye I didn't know I had, and being able to move an arm that I could suddenly see with it.

I was pulling on the heat generated by the hardware I was running on to push my power out to sense around me. Which resulted in two things, I now had a model that I was updating around my hardware centered on my Mind Link, and the hardware itself sped up as it was able to push more electricity without overheating and burning out.

I was still limited to a twenty meter active range, but I could push my passive scanning to detect everything in my Pocket Dimension. And a distance out of the doorways out of my Pocket Dimension. It seems that they are open even while I'm not near them.

I focused my attention on the Mind Link below me, soaking it with my power. It was frozen solid. I tried to cut out a small cube of stone from my fortress, but my power bounced off of it. I could cut out one of the obsolete vacuum tubes, though, so I did that and slid it slowly towards me and the Mind Link.

It was going to take hours to arrive at the pace I could move it, so I started to convert its mass to energy while it was moving. I pushed the heat I was getting into the Mind Link, warming it up. There was a source of cold coming from within the Mind Link, from everywhere at once. I zoomed my model in further and further until I got down to the scale of neurons and synapses being about the size of my body.

I realised that was the scale I was at when I came across a micro-portal where I could push a tiny amount of my power through and sensed the neuron on the other side. I zoomed back out and implemented a scanning program to give me a count of the micro-portals. There were several million of them, though there were spaces where others should be but weren't. Only a tenth were active.

The Mind Link itself was damaged where the material that made it, a high-tech alloy of silver, gold, tin, and niobium, had shrunk in the cold. I started to repair it, but it was such a slow process at the speed I was thinking that I implemented a program to work on it and set it to run in the background.

I went back to neuron-scale and thinned out a tiny thread of power to push through one of the active micro-portals. I could push it out forever before coming to the end of the range of such a small thread, but zooming back out it turned out to only be a few centimeters.

Another program, this one running in parallel hundreds of times at once, began scanning through each of the micro-portals, updating my model of my brain on the other side. It was frozen solid, but thankfully not enchanted, my power was still able to work on it.

The water in my brain had expanded and cracked the borders surrounding most of the micro-portals, which explained the missing micro-portals in the Mind Link. It should be possible to put the damaged micro-portals back together and they should default to their old locations if I'm careful about it.

The Mind Link booted up while I was analysing my brain scan and sent an error over its diagnostic interface. It was, helpfully, telling me that it wasn't receiving any signals through any of its access points.

There really wasn't any reason for the Mind Link to be running firmware or software that wasn't under my control, so I sank my power into its control chip that was only a centimeter away from my hardware and read its programming directly from its hardware.

Some of it that was still in storage memory was encrypted, but the key and decryption algorithm was in its temporary memory. It used an entirely different architecture to my hardware, with some semi-quantum processing thrown in.

The amount of overhead that was required to keep the quantum state in a usable way ended up making it slower than my own solution to high speed processing. I wrote another program to replace its chips with my own and set it running.

The Mind Link program was just a router, taking a signal and an address to one of the two hundred million or so outputs to send it to and a timing synchronisation so that both sides could communicate. It was what was responsible for blacking out my senses when I slowed time too much. When I had a brain again I would have to see if I could improve on that.

The first step towards that would have to be pushing heat through the micro-portals, replacing parts of the brain while it was frozen would mean I would have to replace them multiple times as they froze again from contact to the rest of the brain. And I will need to salvage material from less important parts of the brain to recreate the more important parts.

Ordinarily I could use blood for this small scale work and have it be replaced, but I didn't currently have a working circulatory system. And I would have to replace the energy and oxygen the cells use until I can get my heart working again. Reviving from the dead had complications that made more complications.

My highest priority would be the minimum viable areas that would give rise to consciousness, and then the Matter Manipulation control area of my brain. With those done I should be able to shift initialisation of the work over to my biological side, still controlled by a program on my digital side, and progress much faster without the bottleneck of having to push through the micro-portals. A program would be needed in both cases because of the pain that causes me to black out.

I moved my focus over to a broken micro-portal on my brain's side and reformed it. The portal popped back up in my Mind Link in exactly the place it was before, and there wasn't any pain from doing it.

I rewrote my parallel scanning program to do repairs and initially set it to fixing all of the micro-portals. Due to my limited processing speed the program was only able to use several thousand of the active micro-portals at a time, so I split it equally between repairing micro-portals and restoring the brain parts that would restore my consciousness to my brain.

Pushing heat into my brain slowed the process even further, though it was an easy choice to cannibalise the large part of the brain responsible for dealing with vision to make the changes. Estimated time for minimum consciousness viability, five years subjective, four hours objective. I would need to find something to do while I was waiting...