Gwen Buchanan had been two years old in the Great Collapse, when the technology that had taken decades to build was suddenly dismantled to stop a movement called Transcendence, and in the twenty-one years since then, the world was in a constant flurry to rebuild the data that had been lost in the collapse. Gwen's father, Donald, had been instrumental in the Great Collapse and had since been decorated many times as a hero for his actions.
Still, in diligent efforts to prevent the resurgence of such turmoil - though what the turmoil truly was, Gwen didn't quite understand - the major world governing bodies created a conglomerate governing board called the Gatekeepers, which prevented the information that was allowed to be made available on a worldwide level. Any new information and data recatalogued to be uploaded and stored was first approved by the Gatekeepers before it could be hosted.
At this point, the rebuilding and the technological resurgence had taken off with a boom, though the issue of accessing these restored technologies was another matter entirely. It was too powerful for layfolk, the Gatekeepers concluded. Their brush with Transcendence had taught them a lesson. So, the capabilities were great - even greater than before, those who still recalled would say - but limited only to a few.
Gwen, as it turned out, had been fascinated by technology from a very young age. Even in the early days of rebuilding, when thoughts of free information and free knowledge for the world seemed little more than a fairytale, it was a fairytale the Gwen Buchanan believed with every fiber of her being. So ardent was her interest that when she became old enough and educated enough, she begged her father, whose connections were vast and infallible, to help her get in to work for the Gatekeepers. Donald Buchanan had been named Chairman of the Gatekeepers (after the position was refused by Joseph Tagger), and, unable to resist the fluttering brown eyes of his beloved only child, the only souvenir that remained of his wife who had since passed from illness, he obliged.
His permission, however, did not come with absolute trust. Despite her constant pleas to be involved in something more exciting, he agreed only to place his daughter in the Biological Studies Division - the tamest division in the organization. Gwen grew bored quickly of her job, even if it allowed her the ability to travel and explore. Her occupation consisted solely of taking samples of plants, of animals, of algae and fungi - whatever living specimens she came across, and running the samples through the device her father had given her for her work - the Portable Specimen Identifier, or Psi. It was, arguably, her best friend - it was a folding apparatus, almost like a tiny laptop computer, with a display screen on one side and a scanning screening on the other. Upon collection, she dropped the specimen on the scanning screen and allowed it to run identification. Within seconds a summary of the specimen she collected would be displayed, and the information would be catalogued on the data card of the device.
Gwen had a real best friend, of course, by the name of Bryce Waters. Bryce's father, too, had been instrumental in the Great Collapse, but had always been hesitant to acknowledge his role. She and Bryce had grown up together, and he had to an extent ridden on her coattails to work for the Gatekeepers, much to his father's chagrin.
Max Waters, however, found Gwen incredibly charming - she was a kind, curious girl who was fast to become enthused and slow to lose interest, so while his stories of the days of free technology, of free information for all before the Great Collapse were all but lost on his son, Gwen Buchanan never tired of listening. It had been a lapse in judgment - he would one day chalk it up to his old age - when he allowed Max and Gwen to take their Psis into the garden of an old friend.
"You'll come across all kinds of plants and fungi and algae there - they'll be mostly dead, but the genetic material will be good enough to get on with," he supplied.
Gwen had been immeasurably pleased - though Mr. Waters said little about his old friends, she knew that they were a married couple, and that the wife was an enthusiastic environmentalist, which meant there would be plenty to find. She ranted about the wonders of cross-pollination and hybridization and Punnett squares to Bryce the entire way, and being her best friend of over ten years, he humored her.
"This is a Faraday cage," she said, her fascination clear in her voice as they walked into the garden that was surrounded by some sort of fence. "I read about them - they were used before the Collapse to block out signals, when people used to be able to transmit them freely."
"These freaks must have been paranoid, then," Bryce chuckled, glancing around at the mostly dead plant life - they were surrounded by withered brown plants, but also weeds that had started to overgrow the area. "This place is a little… creepy, don't you think?"
"It's very... Little Shop of Horrors. I kind of like it," Gwen laughed, wandering around still visibly enthralled. She reached over and parted what felt like a curtain of overgrown lemongrass, and paused in surprise when she noticed something bright and yellow peering through. "Look, Bryce! Sunflowers!"
"You don't need to catalogue sunflowers, Gwen, everyone knows what they are -"
"But - these are tiny! Sunflowers are supposed to be big, like they're growing on cornstalks. My mom used to grow them!" she said matter of factly, paying no heed when her best friend simply rolled his eyes at her. "It couldn't hurt," she harrumphed, pulling out her Psi and removing the stylus embedded in the side so she could swab some of the pollen and dew from the center of the flower. "I saw a table inside, I'm going to bring this over there."
"Have fun!" he laughed as he pulled out a pair of latex gloves from his pocket. Bryce, as it turned out, held a record for cataloguing the most species of fungi and insects, because he found amusement in digging around in the dirt, moreso than fiddling around with plants and animals. Gwen chortled and rolled her eyes - no matter how old they got, she knew that boys would be boys. She took her sample and hurried inside the back door of the old house, putting the Psi down on a table and swabbing it across the scanning screen.
"Analyze," she spoke, enunciating clearly so that the voice recognition system on the device would pick up the command. Immediately, the screen lit up and read "Specimen 001", and she stood back a little to allow it to work. Today, however, it seemed to be running slowly, as the status bar ticked away almost imperceptibly. This was odd, she mused. She had just swapped in a new memory card for today, so it was impossible for it to be full already. She frowned a little and reached out to pick up the Psi with every intention of restarting it and processing the sample all over. Right as she was about to touch the device, however, the status bar shot to completion. She withdrew her hand and expected to see a photograph of a flower like the one she had collected the sample from, complete with a short write-up of the species' characteristics as she always saw when she ran a sample.
Instead, she saw the face of a man - and while it was only ever so slight, he was moving. And, admittedly, he was handsome, with dark hair and deep brown eyes. It was the face of a man that, though Gwen did not know it, Mr. Waters would surely recognize, though the man would have looked a good deal older when Max Waters had last seen him.
Gwen was still in shock that this had appeared at all. The pictures she saw never moved, and considering the samples she took, the were never human. But this one made small movements - small flares of the nostrils like he was breathing, small movements of the corners of the mouth. They were miniscule, easy to miss, but Gwen was never one to overlook details. She saw each tiny movement.
"Hello?" Gwen said hesitantly. "Can you hear me?"
The face on the screen of the device did not shift in expression - but she saw it blink. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure that Bryce wasn't close by, and she spoke again. "Hello?" she repeated. "My name is Gwen Buchanan. Can you hear me?"
"Yes. I can hear you, Gwen Buchanan," the face on the screen replied, and Gwen jumped, only just managing not to drop the device in her hands. The voice was flat, almost robotic, but with a sort of inflection to it that she was almost positive could not be anything less than human. "My name is Will Caster."