"It depends! I'm not a lawyer, don't take me too seriously, but I think it's a judgment call based on whether a reasonable person in your position could have guessed that would happen given the information you had. Uh, like, there was one case where someone got assaulted by a force mage and slammed against a wall and hit his head, then committed three assaults in one day, someone tried to get his mother charged with freeing a person who can't follow the law and that didn't stick. I guess you could get arrested and tried if someone complained even if you weren't guilty but that could happen with any crime."

"...Anyway, yes, I think you should have to release your kids anyway by default, unless you can prove that they're not capable of following the law."

"I guess. Most people do that anyway. Usually. If they don't disagree on politics or something."

"But some people are terrible and don't, for various reasons. Like wanting free labor, or disagreeing on politics, my god."

"Yeah, I guess. You think everyone's your clan, don't you? At first I thought it was just the other humans, but it's everyone, isn't it?"

"Well, I don't think the entire world is my family, exactly, and I'm not sure how much feeling is associated with someone being in the clan. But broadly, yes, I want everyone to be free and happy and live long prosperous lives, at least inasmuch as this doesn't hurt other people or trade off too much of other things I care about."

"You know, I bet that worked great where you come from, but you're going to get taken advantage of here because nobody else thinks that way."

He shrugs. "I'll try not to expect kindness. But I don't think I'm going to stop being kind. Probably going to be interesting to observe the changing values of the Immigrant population. I honestly don't know if we'll stop thinking this way eventually!"

"Maybe you'll manage to make enough friends that everyone you meet does the same for you."

"Hmm. Maybe." He scratches his chin. "This is sort of a difficult topic - perhaps we should go back to discussing technical things?"

"Yeah, we probably should. Have you had a chance to try learning to program?"

"Yes, I bought that book. Interesting stuff. Haven't had the chance to do much with it yet, with everything being so busy, but I played around with the tools, did some math. They'll be useful for data processing. I might write a statistical analysis tool, or something."

"I figure in a few years everyone will at least sort of know how to program. It's good to beat the crowds, make a little extra by selling programs before everyone else starts, but I'll probably quit doing it professionally when it's as much of a buyer's market as magic."

"There will be different levels of skill in it. From what I hear only a few knowledge mages can make fine instruments - programming will be similar, I think. It's already the case that you would prefer to have five skilled engineers than twenty mediocre ones on a complicated project."

"I think if I had any reason to want to I could learn to enchant an object to parse natural language, I've just never thought that was the best use of my time. But I guess someday programming will specialize like that."

"I wonder if there's a way to figure out how the computer works, on the basic physical level not the logical one, so we can look for shortcuts or useful quirks? There were books in Milliways on computers, but I don't know what sort of implementation this is. I can't pry my way into the case and look at the hardware myself, but I might want to do experiments to see what kind of operations slow down these computers the most."

"...I read some things while I was there but I think that's the kind of thing Nikolas would know."

"Yes, and he doesn't want to talk to any of us about it. 'Trade secrets'. Cleo's hopping mad about it."

"...He has a price but I'm not sure you have enough rings. Then again I think his price is going down, might be worth a try."

"Hmm, maybe. Question is, would it even be worth the investment? It's only one curiosity in a world full of them, after all."

"From what I read in Milliways, yes. Definitely."

"Perhaps I'll take up a community collection and someone on the planning committee for the new college can go negotiate with him."

"When you're talking with him, ask him whether he wants you to be the first ones to see where he's vulnerable to some kind of virus, or if he wants some agerah in Devor to be the first to figure that out."

"-What does pathology have to do with computers?"

"It's a metaphor I found in some books from his world. He'll know what it means."