"You sure you don't want me to visit from time to time, keep you some company?" I asked as I followed Church along the ridge that was inset to the cliff, south of Blue Base. "It's gonna be a long three months."

"In case you forget, I was alone for a whole millennium, White," Church replied grouchily. "I think I can handle three months."

"God, you're lucky you don't need food or water," I sighed. "Or you would have been dead a long time ago."

"I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have needed food and water in the sim, even if I wasn't an AI," Church replied thoughtfully.

We came to a stop near the end of the ridge, and Church turned to me. "Now remember, you only have four days to talk to Omega before he takes Lopez and escapes-"

"Yeah, I know, we just spent four hours talking about this-"

"Don't screw it up, White, you only have one chance at this-"

"Yes, I know-"

"I mean it, White! If you screw up, we will lose our advantage-"

"I know!" I almost yelled. "I get it, Church. Don't worry, I've got this."

"Alright, then," Church looked around, before turning back to me. "Alright, see you in… however long this takes."

"What are you gonna do in the meantime?" I asked curiously.

"I don't know, I guess… wait?"

"Well if you waited a thousand years I guess you can wait a few extra months," I commented idly.

"Well I don't know, maybe I'll spy on the Reds or something," Church said with a huff. "Just stick to the plan."

"Right, and you..." I spoke, poking my finger on his chest. "keep Tex off my ass. It's gonna become pretty obvious that I'm working for Omega at some point, and I don't want to have to worry about Tex and Omega at the same time."

"Don't worry," said Church with annoyance. "Besides, it's Omega that Tex wants to kill. I don't think she'd care that much about his lackeys."

I gave a huff. "You'd be surprised."

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Church irritably.

"Nothing," I replied, turning around. "Just stick to your part of the plan and I will stick to mine."

"Alright, see you later," Church called as I started making my way back to base.

It didn't take me long to get back, and when I did, I noticed that Tucker and Caboose were still standing around on the roof there, their sniper rifles pointed at Red Base.

"Still spying on the Reds, I see," I commented as I walked up the ramp to the top of Blue Base. "Are they up to anything?"

"No, all they ever seem to do is stand around and talk," Tucker replied irritably, turning around and lowering his sniper rifle. "And I haven't seen the girl at all. It's just those guys in red and yellow armor, standing around and talking all the time."

"As opposed to us, who do anything but stand around and talk," I said dryly, walking up to stand next to him. "Besides, it's maroon and orange armor, dumbass."

"Whatever dude," Tucker dismissed. "Maroon is just another word for dark red."

"Fine, fine." I sighed, before looking around. "Has Church come out at all?"

"No, I think he's still moping over his dead girlfriend," Tucker replied, turning around and pointing his sniper rifle back at Red Base.

"You know, I was thinking-" said Caboose suddenly. "Why won't that Tex guy just come back as a Ghost, like Church did?" Caboose continued. "Then Church won't be sad anymore, and they can be together and we can all be friends… together."

I rolled my eyes. "Ok well, the problem with that, Caboose, is that Church is an AI, while Tex is not, therefore, she can't come back as a ghost, because ghosts aren't real."

"Oh come on dude, are you still going on about that?" Tucker asked with a huff. "You said yourself that it would take a long time to make an AI out of Church, and last time I heard, Church's body is still dead meat."

"How do you make an AI out of someone anyway?" asked Caboose.

I ignored him. "I don't know how that AI came to be, but it's an AI, trust me. There's no such thing as ghosts, and I'm gonna prove it."

"How're you gonna do that?" Tucker asked.

"If the AI is Church himself, it's possible that he was connected to his body via a neural interface," I replied. "If it's not Church, then it's mimicking him somehow. In that case I would just have to find out where it's processor core is located."

"Well when you say it like that-"

"¡Hey, White, get down here!!" came the call of Church's voice from the Flag room.

I turned around and walked over to the gap in the roof that lead to the Flag room. "Why, whats up?"

"¡I need you to do that death certificate thing so we can bury Tex's body,!" He glanced to the side. "¡And my body too.!"

"Fine," I dropped down through the gap, and landing next to Church.

"¡Also, I'm a ghost, dude,!" Church said irritably. "¡Stop going on with that AI crap. It's getting annoying!!"

"Yeah, Sure, Whatever." I groaned. "I'll let you know when I'm done."

Church nodded, and with that, I headed down to the morgue and spent the next few hours examining the bodies to produce death certificates.

"Church, we need to talk-" I was saying as I stepped into the machine room several hours later, wiping bodily fluids off my gloves with a white cloth, only to halt after observing the scene in front of me. Caboose was airbrushing Church's new body in his his favorite cobalt color, while Tucker stood in front of him with a tablet in his hand, probably trying to turn his speech settings back to English.

"Hey, wait a minute. Why are you still possessing this Mexican guy?" I asked in a faux-confused voice, folding up the cloth and putting it on the counter. "I know he's technically our prisoner, but that has to be violating some international law or treaty… and his civil rights, too."

"Uh, yeah… turns out the 'Mexican guy' is a robot," Tucker divulged, looking up from his tablet. "That's why Church was speaking Spanish, I think."

"Gee, and I thought he was just being an ass," I snarked, looking at Church. "So let me get this straight, you're a ghost… possessing a Spanish-speaking,- and based on the fumes my suit is detecting in this room- diesel-powered robot… and that's just perfectly normal to you?"

Church just stared at me for a long, uncomfortable moment.

"Uh..." Tucker awkwardly scratched the back of his head. "I think I accidentally turned his speech off. Could you help me with this, please?"

"Typical," I rolled my eyes and made to help him.

"I think I like this new Church, he's not as mean as the old one," Caboose commented, turning off his airbrush.

"Uh, yeah, that's because he can't talk, Caboose," Tucker pointed out.

"Yeah, if he could talk, he'd probably be busting a gasket right about now," I agreed, walking to stand next to Tucker, and taking the tablet from him. "ya know, 'cause he's a robot."

Caboose stood up and looked at me. "Well maybe if you were nicer to him, he wouldn't be mean all the time. If you aren't nicer to him I'll rip your head off and give it to him as a gift."

I blinked and shared an alarmed look with Tucker. "Uh… okay… Caboose. I'll… get right on that."

"Thank you!" Caboose chirped cheerfully. "And my name isn't Caboose, it's O'malley."

I was exhausted by the time Tucker and I had worked out all the kinks in Church's new body, which took two hours and involved shifting through a bunch of Lopez's internal files to find a script that was somehow automatically translating all of the English that Church was speaking into Spanish for some reason. Unfortunately, the original English language files had been corrupted somehow, so I couldn't just turn on the English settings.

By the time Church and I arrived back in the morgue, I had been awake for almost 20 hours, due to the excitement of the previous day, tending to Tex all night, my long talk with future-Church, and on top of all that, examining two dead bodies so that I could prove to present-Church once and for all that he was an AI.

As it was, I was feeling quite tired and irritable, and was tempted to just go to bed and push it all off until tomorrow, but I knew that if I did that, there was a chance that I would over-sleep, and Church might decide to just go ahead and bury the bodies without me there to object to it.

Which meant I had to get this over with now instead of later.

"So… you're finished with the death certificate thing?" Church asked after we walked into the morgue. "We can go ahead and bury the bodies?"

"Not quite," I replied tiredly, walking over to where Church's body was laying on the table. "I found something weird and I was wondering if you could tell me what it was."

"Well what is it, then?" Church asked impatiently.

In the process of examining the bodies, I had taken all the armor off and cleaned them up as good as I could, and had covered them with mortuary shrouds before I had left. I made a mental note to clean my armor with soap when I got up tomorrow while I lifted the mortuary shroud off of the head of Church's dead body.

Rigor mortis had set in, so I had to forcefully push dead-Church's head over so that I could show him the implant. "Do you know what this is?"

"Isn't that the standard implant everyone gets when they join the military?" Church asked curiously.

"No, it's not, actually," I replied factually, turning around and tapping a screen on the wall. A picture appeared on it."This is what the normal implant looks like. Your implant is non-standard. And that's not the only weird thing about it…"

I tapped the screen again. "The standard implant uses nanofilaments to alter the chemistry of the part of the brain that processes visual information, as part of an advanced IFF that works in conjunction with your suit's systems. Your implant, on the other hand..."

While the previous picture had shown a holographic projection of a normal implant within the brain, the new picture showed the dead-church's implant, which looked very different.

The normal implant was shown with the brain grayed out, and the nanofilaments in red, with the nanofilaments only interacting with a small area of the brain. Church's implant on the other hand, showed the nanofilaments interacting with his entire brain, but being particularly present in the neocortex and hippocampus.

Church stared at the picture. "I… have no idea what that is. I didn't even know I had it..."

"Well, you're not the only one," I commented, moving over to stand next where Tex's body was.

"Tex had one too?" asked Church in surprise.

I took the shroud of her head as well, and turned it over to reveal the implant. "They both appear to be of the exact same design. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to identify a manufacturer, so I have no idea who made them. You really had no idea this was in your head?"

"No! I'm as shocked as you are," Church rubbed the back of his head in confusion.

"Well, there's one other thing," I replied, moving back to dead-Church, and lightly pressing the implant on the back of his head. A slot opened up, and the AI data chip emerged. I took it and held it up. "Do you know what this is?"

"No? I'd thought we'd established by now, I didn't even know I had that in my head," Church replied grouchily.

"It's an AI data chip," I said simply.

"Oh don't get started on that again," Church exploded angrily. "I'm a ghost, not an AI. I don't care what you pull out of your ass, I've always been a ghost, and I will always be a ghost, and that's final!"

"Church-"

"No! I don't want to hear it! I'm a ghost! End of the line!" With that, he turned around and stormed out.

Wow, he really was resistant to the idea. No matter, all I had to do was insert the data chip into the computer and he would find out the truth, like Future-Church had said.

That could wait until tomorrow, however. In the mean time I really was tired.

I made sure to grab Tex's data chip, before putting the bodies back in cold storage. Then I went to my room, took off my armor, and went to bed for a good night's sleep.

It was close to noon when I woke up the following day, though the only way I could tell was from my clock. As far as I knew, the sun never really set in Blood Gulch, it simply got lower or higher in the sky, and not really on a regular basis either, so the only way we had to tell time really was clocks.

As I lay in my cot, looking up at the concrete ceiling, I realized I'd only been here for about four days so far. It was a surprising thing to realize, as those had been four very action packed, very busy days.

I sat up and moved my feet to rest on the floor, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, before looking up and around my room. My room wasn't particularly large, the floor space was about four square-meters, with the ceiling being about a meter above my head when I was standing up. The only things in my room were my cot, a small dresser that also served as a night-stand, and the armor rack that held my armor when I wasn't wearing it.

Looking at my armor, I realized that it looked kind of grimy, no doubt from all that action from yesterday, so it'd probably be a good idea to clean it now, and I got up to do just that.

With a washcloth and a bottle of soap, I began washing off the chest-piece first, and while I was cleaning, I thought about my agenda for the day.

The previous four days may have been busy, but now I hopefully had three months of monotony to look forward to, before Doc arrived at least. I wondered what I should do with those three months.

I was already closing in on my primary goal of getting Church to realize that he was an AI. All I had to do insert the AI data chip into a computer like Future-Church had said, and that goal would be realized.

However, there was a potential problem that I had to deal with first, and that was Lopez.

If AI Church was in a computer, then he wasn't possessing Lopez, which would mean Lopez would either escape, or assault Blue Base and try to kill us all. I had to find a way to neutralize Lopez before I could think about putting Church's data chip in a computer.

Once I finished that, then I had to somehow ingratiate myself with O'malley so that I could find out what his Evil Plan is, and why Wyoming was going through all the trouble to time travel us all over the place. Did that mean that I should try and reach O'malley while he was possessing Caboose? I considered the question for a moment, before deciding against it.

For one, Tex was still hanging around at the moment, and if she saw me trying to get in touch while O'malley the AI, before we were supposed to know that Caboose was possessed by him, she would have some uncomfortable questions to ask me that I couldn't answer without giving myself away, if she didn't feed me a bullet sandwich first.

For two, from what I remembered, O'malley had apparently had trouble controlling Caboose during that initial period while he was possessing Caboose, when he hadn't had any problem controlling Doc. In fact, Caboose had, for some reason, believed that he was O'malley during that time. I didn't know what was up with that, but that probably meant that it was pointless to try and communicate with O'malley the AI at this point in time.

In fact, it would probably just be better to wait until O'malley was possessing Doc before trying ingratiate myself with him. And not having to talk to Caboose anymore than usual was just bonus points in my opinion.

My choice made, I finished cleaning my armor and rinsed it, then made my way out of the base.

I emerged from the base to find the other Blues crowded around a pair of freshly dug and filled in graves. I sighed and shook my head. I was glad I had the foresight to take care of the AI implant issue the previous day. I walked up to stand between Tucker and Church.

"So, which one of you is Jewish?" I pointed at one of the headstones, the one with the Star of David shape. The other headstone was the Christian Cross.

"Uh, that's me," Church replied. "I'm Jewish."

"I see," I said quietly, and the four of us fell into silence again, looking at the headstones.

"Um… Maybe someone should say something," Church looked back at us.

"Ok, go ahead," Tucker replied.

"Not me, jackass," Church rebuked irritably. "I'm not gonna eulogize myself."

"What? Why not? I eulogize myself all the time..." Tucker trailed off.

"Somehow I get the feeling that you don't know what the word 'eulogize' means," I snarked.

"Wait, I know how to do this," Caboose cut in, turning to the graves. "'Dearly beloved-'"

"No, shut him up-" Church muttered. "-seriously, shut him up."

Caboose carried on blithely. "'-We are gathered here, today, to witness, the joining together of Tex, and Church, in eternal… ness, together… smuh. Speak now! Or forever... rest, in peace. With Liberty. And Justice. For all. The End.'"

"Man, this funeral is laaame," Tucker groaned. "If you need me I'll be over by my rock."

"Hey Tucker, can I have a piggy-ride back to base?" Church asked hopefully.

"Wait, what? Are you a child?!" I spluttered. "What kind of grown-ass-man asks for a piggy-back ride?!"

"Oh come on, I'm in mourning here!" Church whined. "I've been through so much! One piggy-back ride aint gonna kill ya."

I gave him a flat look.

"I don't know, I kind of agree with White over here," Tucker chuckled. "Besides, that metal robot weighs, like, eight thousand pounds. I'd probably break my back trying to lift you."

"Speaking of the big metal robot, I was wondering if I could have another look at it's internal systems," I rubbed my chin. "It could have other functions that could be useful, like helping us fix the tank."

"I don't know, why don't you fix the tank yourself?" Church asked with a shrug. "You don't seem to have a problem fixing anything else."

"Um, because I'm not a mechanic?" I replied flatly. "I received medic training in basic, and learned about computers in high school. I'm not a miracle worker."

"Alright, fine," Church sighed. "But don't come crying to me if you activate 'killer robot' mode."

I gave him another flat look, before sighing. "Well, come on."

And with that, we made our way back to the machine room.

"So I'm gonna need you to stand still while I work on this, ok?" I asked as Church and I entered the machine room. "It might take me a while."

"A while? How long is a 'while'?" Church asked in reply, standing in the doorway.

"I don't know," I shrugged. "Could take me a few hours, or a few days, Maybe even a whole week."

"You want me to stand still for a week? That sounds kind of... boring,"

"You can watch some tv while I work, I don't mind," I replied while walking over to a display and tapping it.

"Do we even get tv out here?" Church walked to stand next to me.

"No, I meant from the public domain files," I replied testily "There's more content there than you could watch in a lifetime."

"Eh, but it's all old stuff, over two centuries old," Church complained. "I'd rather watch newer, more modern stuff."

"Well you can stand still and watch nothing, I suppose," I rolled my eyes. "Or we can leave and our tank will remain damaged out there in the middle of the canyon. Your call."

"Ugh, fine," Church groaned, rubbing the back of his head. "I suppose watching something would be better than nothing."

"Well, you could always watch Sci-Fi shows," I replied, tapping the sci-fi section of the public domain files. "That might be closer to what you're used to."

"Ok, cool," Church nodded. "Do you know any shows that are good?"

"Well, there's Battlestar Galactica," I tapped one of the files. "I really liked that one."

"Oh, I've already seen that one," Church admitted. "Did you know that they're finally gonna make the last half of season four?"

I goggled at him. "What? Who is? The original producers have been dead for, like... over four hundred years, and it's been in the public domain for over half that time."

"Disney, who else?" Church replied, tilting his head in confusion.

I blinked. Oh right, Disney. I kept forgetting that they controlled all media in the future.

"I guess you can watch something else then," I picked a different file. "How about 12 monkeys? It's pretty good."

"What's it about?"

I tapped the file in question, and a poster of the show blew up on the display. "It's about a guy who travels back in time to prevent a global pandemic that kills 98% of the population."

"Ugh, I hate time travel stories," Church groaned. "The protagonist always winds up killing themselves."

I gave him a flat look. "Usually those kind of stories are about the journey, not the destination. Besides, I totally swear he doesn't kill himself in this story."

"Well, if you think it's good..." Church trailed off.

"It is, trust me," I nodded.

"Still… " Church hesitated. "I'd say I'm more into crime and cop shows and stuff like that."

I rolled my eyes. "Well, there's always Breaking Bad."

"Breaking Bad?" Church asked curiously. "Can't say I've heard of that one."

"You'd probably love it, then," I nodded. "It's about this chemistry teacher who gets cancer, so he decides to break bad by cooking meth to leave his family a nest egg before he dies."

"Cancer?" Church stared at me in confusion. "What's that?"

"It's this really old disease people used to get," I pointed out. "Basically, it's what happens when something goes wrong in your body and your cells start growing out of proportion. Nowadays it's easily curable, but back then it was basically a terminal illness."

"Ok, I can dig it," Church frowned. "But why would cooking meth be considered breaking bad? What do you mean by breaking bad anyway?"

I rolled my eyes. 26th century people, seriously.

"Well, back in the 21th Century, Meth was illegal," I informed him. "If you got caught cooking and distributing it, you could go to jail for a long time. The same was true of pot and cocaine. Basically, the show is an exploration of the consequences of those policies."

"What, you mean like a documentary?" Church's frown deepened. "Not a big fan of those."

"No, it's completely fictional," I sighed with annoyance. "Seriously, just watch it and you'll understand."

"Alright, fine, I'll give it a try," Church sighed, before turning on the tv.

With Church settled in to watch the tv show, I made to grab a tablet and start poking around at Lopez's software. It only took me a few minutes to realize what kind of garbage I was dealing with, and I decided that I was going to kill Sarge for this, honestly. His code was every programmer's worst nightmare:

No documentation!

No comments!

No indentation!

A horrendous file system that I couldn't make heads or tails of!

And on top of all that, it was written in an obscure programming language that I'd never even heard of before.

At least it wasn't Brainfuck, or Ook!, and I was glad that he had at least been stupid enough to leave the source code itself in Lopez's file storage, but still.

All in all, I spent spent the first few days of this project just reorganizing the code to be human readable, rearranging the file system to be more organized, and learning the language.

And next few days after that, refactoring everything to be more efficient.

With that out of the way, the following day was spent changing Lopez IFF files to recognize Blue Team as friends instead of foes, and obey our commands.

However, I was careful to still leave enough free-will so that Lopez would still be willing to leave with She- I mean, Philis, to form their own robot army, as I still needed that to happen, so that events would proceed as planned.

It was when I was in the middle of all this that I realized that I had a problem:

If we got Lopez to fix the tank too early… it could throw the timeline out of wack.

With that in mind, I decided to isolate and extract the memory systems that focused on vehicle repair and maintenance, and simply claim that they had been corrupted, which, thankfully, would take a while to fix.

"So how is that file corruption thing coming along, White?" Church asked me a few weeks later.

"As I've already told you before," I replied with exasperation. "It's going to take a while to fix."

"A while? How long is a 'while'?" Church asked irritably.

"Could be a few weeks, could be a few months," I shrugged. "Data corruption isn't an easy fix, you know. And this is a lot of data."

"Well, hurry up, we need to get that tank fixed," Church ordered with annoyance, turning to walk out of the machine room.

"Wait," I said, holding up my hand. "There's something else I've been meaning to talk to you about."

"What is it?" Church turned around.

As I'd been spending most of my time in the machine room lately, I had decided to have the matfab make me a desk and chair for me to sit on while I was working. As the files in question weren't actually corrupted, I've mostly been watch old tv shows to fill up my time with, as there wasn't much else to do in here.

I pulled open one of the desk drawers, and pulled out the two AI data chips I'd been holding onto. "I wanted to talk about these."

"Oh come on, not this again," Church growled angrily. "White, I've told you-"

I threw up my hands. "Ok, ok. I get it. You're a ghost. It's fine. I just… these chips could contain important information that could explain why you had those weird implants. Don't you at least want to find out what that's all about?"

Church glared at me angrily for a long moment. "Alright fine. If it will get you to shut up… go ahead and plug them into the computer."

I nodded and did just that.