"No, I know what you say you're going to do. I have no idea what you're actually doing."

"I have never talked to a human before. Is it normal for humans to be like you?"

"Uh, usually humans are less confused and less nervous than this."

"I am also confused.

I still need this stuff. Are you going to try to stop me? Or give me different stuff you don't want as much?"

"I can give you stuff without an internet connection and then I will be somewhat less nervous about you using it." Not zero nervous, but he doesn't want to see what she does if she decides he's a threat.

"Okay!"

Then she can have a box with plenty of hard disk and whatever input ports she needs, but otherwise heavily nerfed. He's very curious how she's going to interface it with, presumably, a humanlike brain.

She doesn't stick any cables in her ears; apparently whatever she's doing works over airgap. Occasionally she asks for more things.

She can have more things. He attempts to shoulder-surf, mainly out of scientific curiosity as she continues to refrain from taking down the US power grid, broadcasting mind-melting psychic rays, opening a bigger portal to admit an alien army, etc.

She is writing a compression algorithm. "You do not have very much space on this hardware."

"I can get you an external drive, but I expect you'll find everything at this tech level disappointing. How much do you need?"

"If I assume this will live another six decades then I can fit my backup onto less than a petabyte. But I can upgrade over time. My diff from my last backup is not that big yet. Mostly the space limitations are giving me problems with format."

"We can definitely get you a bigger one long-term. Also a legal identity, though that may need to wait until the current mess is over. I don't suppose you know anything about stopping rogue AIs?"

"You have a rogue AI?"

"Yes. We created him to deter alien invasions; he decided his job would be easier if everyone on Earth died. The accident that summoned you happened while I was investigating the alien artifact we learned some stuff about AIs from."

"I did not know this was what happened! You need to be very careful with AIs. If you only get them almost right they kill you. What aliens are bothering you?"

"Most recently an Asgardian named Loki and a whole load of Chitauri, but there's enough species out there that the next one could be anybody."

"Huh. I don't recognize those names."

"Do you know where you're from relative to Earth?"

"Yes."

"Oh good, then I can just show you a map." He pulls up a fancy hologram map of their chunk of the galaxy. "We're here, Asgard is over here, and we don't know where the Chitauri came from but judging by the amount of power their portal was drawing it was probably within this radius. Though they could have been staging through somewhere and have their actual homeworld farther out."

She stares at this map for a very long time.

". . . Is something giving you trouble?"

"This is not what I expected."

"Is that in a 'I've done a different amount of time travel than I thought' kind of way or a 'I'm actually in an alternate timeline' kind of way?"