The dogs don't chase them. It's getting dark, and the mini goats are mostly rounded up at this point.

After a little running they make it to a narrow road, just about one and a half pedestrians wide with occasional bulbouts to enable passing.

Church doesn't feel like talking to Washington at the moment, so he goes back to trying to figure out the data protocols, which has been surprisingly... easy? Like he's done this before, like his mind can manipulate data like putty in his hands. He keeps a thread of attention on Wash, which is also surprisingly easy: when he focuses on purely virtual tasks like this, it feels like time slows down.

...which is weird, and even though it's objectively very useful, he kind of hates it, because- 

ok let's think about something else now. Data! data data data. Unravel the patterns, find the information... 

Wash doesn't really feel like talking, either. He looks around for somewhere secluded to take a nap. 

It's a very farmy area but there's an orchard with a bunch of beehives, and a shed full of beekeeping equipment with enough room for someone to nap in it if they curl up.

Wash very cautiously inspects the shed, on high alert for DOGS.

The shed does not contain any dogs. There's a cat, which opens one eye when the door opens, but then decides this is not its problem and goes back to sleep.

Wash twitches a bit at the movement, then sighs. 

"Just a cat."

He curls up in a corner with a good view of the door. As the adrenaline starts to leave his body, his brain catches back up.

"...Wait. This place has cats, and dogs, and goats, and farm equipment and tools that are clearly human-sized, but they're using data protocols you aren't familiar with, and..."

He looks around. Spots labels on the shelves, in an alphabet he's never seen in his life, along with a book. Frowns.

"Where the fuck are we?"

"Huh?" 

Church spools more his attention away from the data analysis (why can he feel that happening now, this is so unsettling (He knows why he can feel it, obviously, the real question is why he couldn't feel it befor- (he knows that too, actually, he rememb- !aaa!!stopstopsto!!)))

...He quickly reviews the last several seconds of sensor logs from Wash's camera and microphone. Cross-checks it with all the data they have with them. 

"That... isn't any writing system known to the UNSC. Human or alien."

Wash sighs. "I was afraid you'd say that. ...Maybe this is some kind of... splinter colony planet? Or maybe something weirder is going on. Fuck if I know."

He yawns, involuntarily. 

"Okay. I need to get some sleep. Keep watch, wake me up if you hear or see anything, and keep working on that data."

"Hey asshole, would it kill you to say 'please' once in a while?"

"...also, before you pass out, grab that book and flip through the pages." 

"Please", he adds, only moderately sarcastically.

Wash wordlessly grabs the book and flips through the pages swiftly, leaving each one open for just long enough for the camera to capture the text. 

He reshelves the book, settles himself back into the corner, and sighs.

The problem is that it's hard to stay mad at Church, no matter how obnoxious the AI is. Wash knows he would hardly be doing better, in his shoes. Circuits. Whatever.

"...yeah, alright. Please keep watch. Wake me if anything important happens."

Huh. Church wasn't actually expecting that, especially not after the grumpy silence. Well, it's not like he's actually known Wash all that long. (a sudden flash of a blond man on an operating table, screaming-(NOPENOPENOPE))

"You got it, boss."

Church gets to work on the book. From context, it seems like it's about... beekeeping? He doesn't really give a shit about bees, but it's a better place to start with the language than signal analysis, so... bees. 

A little while later, he's gotten as much out of the book (and all the labels visible in the shed, and on the path here) as he thinks he will get. He's also learned as many as several facts about bees. Apparently worker bees (worker is a gender of bee???) only live 6-8 weeks; during that short time, they might fly enough to travel around this entire planet 1.5 times. Their tiny lil wings beat over ten thousand times every minute.

...Bees are kinda neat, he GUESSES.

Also, these people seem weirdly into training animals to do things. The cat here is probably trained to help with beekeeping, and the book has instructions for how you'd train a dog to help, too. That's... also kind of neat. And it tracks with the dog-goat thing earlier, too. 

And also he's weirdly good at language deciphering? (Blarg blarg honk (Wait, was he only good at that because of his experience wi- (NOPENOPE))

It's been... about 45 minutes. Shit. He starts trawling through signals. What kind of data is being transmitted wirelessly around here?

Music and movies and text and images! The beekeeper's farmhouse is sending location data from their phones and receiving a TV show.

He'll start with the text! The first thing to do is to figure out the protocol, which doesn't take too long; there's only so many ways that make sense to encode text. Then he'll dump all the text data he's seen and incorporate that into his language models. While that's happening, he starts using his protocol knowledge to decode their other media content. Does the video stream have subtitle data broadcasted alongside it? He can start learning how the language is pronounced, that way...

The video stream absolutely has subtitle data broadcasted alongside it. This is a civilized place.

Okay, cool. Church can start learning a lot about the language and how it is spoken, with all this data. It does really fascinating things with negation! It's... a kind of irregular conjugation? 

He's going to keep working until he thinks he could probably interpret a basic spoken conversation in real time and generate holographic text responses, if he had to. That will probably take him 6 hours or so! Does anything interesting happen while he's doing that?

Well, the person in the farmhouse stops watching TV and goes to bed. Depending on how good his sensitivity is he can still pick up radio bands, though, which have various phone conversations and broadcasts all through the night.

His sensitivity is really good! The radio units on Project Freelancer armor kits are several kinds of absurd, really. (He should know. He helped design them. (He should know. He knew, at one point, and he will know again, in the future. But right now, he has almost no memories from that part of his life.)) 

Church hums away at the language all evening, picking up on phone calls, broadcasts, and what are presumably web page loads happening all around him, drinking in the information available to him. 

What can he pick up about the people he's snooping on? What are they talking about, or reading about? (What was the television show about, for that manner?)

Things he can pick up:

Most people here sleep at night; the traffic goes way down, though not to zero, dropping off gradually from sunset to midnight and then just a few people till the sun's about to come up and folks start waking up again.

The television show was a medical drama roughly 80% banter and shipping by volume, though there is a coherent medical plotline carrying on around that and in the remaining 20%. The episode watched tonight featured the appendix-surgeon confessing her love to the anesthetist and a B-plot about a therapy cat in the pediatric ward having some kind of rivalry with one of the orderlies in a way that may or may not be the orderly's imagination.

The people who stay up all night in this area appear to include:

- an emergency dispatcher who is mostly playing an online game about breeding cows to have fantastical colors and traits in between reading their social media feeds, connected to GOAT TRACK MUNICIPAL WIFI. They have successfully bred a cocoa cow and also one that has six legs and produces different cuts of meat in this fashion, by the time their shift is over.
- a parent who (judging by their messages to an advice-medic in another town) is up late with a sick baby, and after the medic assures them they don't need to call the emergency dispatcher about it instead spends the night reading smutty fanfiction about characters from a book series who have various combinations of magical powers and also antlers.
- an extreme night owl who is up like this every night just 'cause and is spending tonight gardening with a headlamp on, streaming this activity to the internet and chatting about caterpillars and scallion cultivars and the headlamp itself which he apparently got free to review (he likes it, overall, but thinks it should be available in more colors of light in addition to the 15 colors of band and lamp housing).

Some piece of Church finds these people oddly compelling and charming? (He tries not to think about which piece. He isn't supposed to have his pieces? what's going on? questions for never later!!!).

By the time the sun starts to rise, he's confident in his understanding of the language enough to translate a conversation.
(He's also judging this cow breeding game. He thinks it's kind of dumb!)

When he sees the light, he sets off Wash's currently configured wake-up alarm. He also tries to check the local internet to find something like a government building nearby, or some other place it'd make sense to start talking to people. Can he find anything like that nearby?

The emergency responder works from a municipal government building! It's about a mile away from this bee shed. (The cat woke up and has left through the catflap.)

Wash was in fact too tired to have much in the way of dreams, which is good for his quality of sleep. He wakes to the sound of his alarm and looks around blearily. 

"Okay, I'm awake. Looks like there were no problems during the night? You learn anything interesting?"

 "Good morning, sunshine!" Wow, Church sounds obnoxiously cheerful, even to himself. Maybe he should dial it back a bit? Eh, it's not like Caboose is here to see it. 

"Tons, actually. I've got their audio, text and video codecs down pretty well, and I can translate the language well enough for a conversation. Also, there's an emergency responder about a mile from here. I'll brief you on the rest of what I learned while we walk."

Huh. That's... a lot more progress than he was expecting. "Good work", he says to fill the pause while he thinks. Delta could have done that much over an evening, he's pretty sure? Church being able to do all that is not at all in-line with how the AI was functioning over the last few days, but he supposes it's been less than 18 hours since he first told the AI he was Alpha, and less than that since he saw the proof firsthand. 

Ah, hell, it's not like Wash is an AI troubleshooting (mental health?) specialist. If Church wants to talk about it, he can.

"While 'we' walk, huh? Alright, smart guy, lead the way." 

Church has his hologram salute, and then start marching in an extremely exaggerated gait. He populates Wash's HUD with a map to the emergency responder. As Wash walks, Church chatters at him.

"Alright, so they have an internet, but their computers are ancient compared to UNSC standard issue, let alone this Freelancer hardware. I haven't poked around their history too much, yet, but I haven't seen anything so far that suggests they're radical separatists, or anything? As far as I can tell, this planet is populated by humans who've just... mysteriously had no contact with the rest of the galaxy, which is weird, of course, but..."

They proceed along the path towards where the emergency responder should be. Now that it's daytime, they're a lot more visible! They make a pretty odd pair, visually; a man in futuristic full-body power armor, grey with yellow highlights, chatting to a much smaller holographic suit of blue power armor.