Now there is a person here! She looks puzzled. She is wearing one glove and what might be a backwards jacket. She blinks at him.

He's at least as confused as she is! He would honestly have been less confused by a horrifying segmented alien, though also more dead.

"What?!"

"What?!" she repeats.

"I take it you're not an alien invasion. But then who are you?"

She looks at him for a while.

Finally, she says, "I'm a spaceship. Where am I?"

"You're in Avengers Tower in New York on Earth. In what way are you a spaceship? Are you also a human?" A time-traveling cyborg would not be the weirdest thing he's seen this week.

"I am not an entire spaceship. This is sort of human but mostly it is part of me, a spaceship. With some other stuff.

What year is it?"

"That sounds really cool, we don't know how to do that yet. It's 2015."

"Do you know how I got here?"

He looks at the instrument panel, which has returned to its former equilibrium. "I have a broad outline--this alien device opened a spacetime rift in some way that involved emitting a lot of mesons--but I don't understand it well enough to send you back. I'm sorry."

"That's bad."

"Yes it is. Do you think the rest of yourself will be able to find you?" He definitely hopes the answer is yes for her sake, but he's undecided on what he hopes for his own.

"No. I think I need to make a backup archive of this and send myself a time capsule."

"What's that going to involve?"

She looks around. "I can probably do the backup part with stuff you have."

"That's good. Can you explain as you go? I could stand to have a backup of my brain." Also he doesn't want a total rando doing things he doesn't understand to his equipment.

"I can't do it for a human." She inventories what he's got and picks up a spare laptop in the corner.

"Oh, you need to be the right kind of cyborg or something? Can you explain how it works anyway?"

"I don't know if I will explain so you can understand. I never met a human before." She collects other objects.

"I guess we'll find out. Are you planning to keep or permanently modify any of that?"

"Yes. Is it important? I don't know where else to get stuff. This isn't important when it's backed up to the rest of me but right now it is not and I don't want to lose it."

"Look, I get that backing yourself up is important, but I only have your word for it that that's what you're doing and not, say, deploying a virus to take over the internet."

"I would not need to keep or permanently modify your stuff to do that."

"See, I was hoping you'd say something reassuring and that was actually the opposite."

"Do you not know how viruses work? They do not need to stay on the first machine. So since I am planning to keep and permanently modify this you could guess I am not going to write a virus."

"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?"

"The second way!"

"Cool! --I mean, uh, sorry to hear that, that sounds really inconvenient."

"It is bad! I do not know if I can be put together again."

Her facial expression and voice don't match her words at all but he has about negative six legs to stand on when judging other people's nonverbal communication. "In theory, if the staff brought you here it ought to be able to put you back."

"How does it do that?"

"I wish I knew! I had it hooked up to a bunch of scanners but I hadn't just done anything to it, and it looked like it just decided to open a portal to wherever you were. The last person who had it was able to open wormholes on purpose, but he used it to try to conquer Earth and now he's dead, so we can't ask him."

"Do you have a guess where he could have learned how?"

"Hmm. Loki doesn't seem like the type to have figured it out himself; he needed to steal a machine someone else made to use it on purpose. He probably didn't learn it on Earth, though. The physicist who made the wormhole generator is still around, but I have no idea if he'll talk to us. Also, all the previous examples have been of wormholes between two points in the same timeline."

"Where does the physicist live?"

"In this city, if his place didn't get destroyed. I'll send him an email. And we should talk to Tony Stark; technically this is his building and I'm just living in it."

"Okay."

He pulls out a device and  it, taps something out on it, then looks up again. "Told Tony we're coming. But first, do you want anything to eat or drink?" For all he knows she photosynthesizes or takes AA batteries, but it seems polite to ask.

"I have never had human food before! I think humans like food. I think this might be because it is good. I want some."

"Okay, this way then." He starts leading her out of the lab into an elevator. "I'm curious what you did instead of eating human food."

"I have to feed this and the others but it is not food humans made. I was stolen by the alien Presger and it does not understand a lot of things."

"Yikes. Uh, I hope being stolen wasn't causing you problems?" The elevator takes them to a massive kitchen and eating area, where Bruce rummages through a refrigerator. "We have pizza, we have Chinese takeout, we have I don't know what this is so it's probably Barton's, I guess you have no reference point for any of this so I vote Chinese."

"Okay! I will eat Chinese."