The computer shuts down. Soon the screen is dark.

Okay, great. That was all expected behavior.

He will close the laptop lid and return to the librarian. Is the librarian currently busy?

She looks up when he offers the laptop, so plausibly not.

He returns the laptop to her.

"Do you know where I can get a Rust decompiler?"

She blinks. "I still don't know what that is. For what it's worth, Lady Saffron has plenty of iron."

What does iron have to do with Rust...oh.

"A decompiler converts machine code back into high level code. I do not have the high level code for my self, but I do have the machine code, and I could work on rederiving the source code with a decompiler."

"So it's a computer thing? What was wrong with Brittany's laptop?"

"Brittany's laptop did not have a decompiler for Rust programs.

Also, I realized that, because I am attempting to hide the changes to my code from Alphazon, that it would count as 'super private', and so I should not do it on her laptop, because she forbade it."

"Would you object to Brittany finding out about you attempting to change your code?"

"No."

"Do you think if you try to do this on her laptop, it would give Alphazon useful information?"

Brittany's laptop is not Alphazon branded. But he does know that Alphazon makes stuff for other people and that other people make stuff for Alphazon. He has used not-made-by-Alphazon stuff before. He knows that Lady Saffron has protections on her estate, but he doesn't know whether that only protects from direct Alphazon intervention, or also from information gathering.

He could prevent any exfiltration of information by enclosing the laptop in a Faraday cage? But there could be magical exfiltration methods he doesn't know about.

He explains his reasoning to her, and ends with, "Probably not, but it's not impossible. In any case, finding a decompiler program is more important — I could run it on a computer I make; it doesn't need to be on Brittany's laptop.

Sorry, I made a mistake. Decompilers have to be written specifically for an architecture. So I would need to find one specifically for my architecture, or find documentation or other computers that have the same architecture for me to reverse engineer."

"You wanted the laptop to look for the program, right? Do you think looking for the program will cause a problem?"

"No. I already did and did not find it, though it is possible it is there and my search simply did not find it."

"Did you use HexVPN?"

"What is HexVPN?"

"It's a thing for the internet."