"It is therefore my proposition to the Board that we conduct a full and formal audit of our handling of such situations…"
The thirty-five other men gathered at the oval table in the board room - the world leaders of the Gatekeepers - glanced back and forth between one another at Chairman Buchanan's suggestion. This summit was an annual affair, and in years past, Buchanan had simply taken on the symbolic role of calling for votes and keeping the peace in discussions. He rarely presented his own propositions.
"Chairman Buchanan, don't you think that's a bit… excessive?" The Turkish emissary asked, leaning his forearms across the table and staring their leader down. "I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say that our hearts go out to your daughter, but it seems irresponsible to compromise the operations of our entire organization -"
"This is not a personal vendetta, gentleman," Donald said smoothly, raising a hand and interrupting his colleague as gently as possible. "This is recognition of a flaw in our operations, and flaws should be fixed. Our system is sick -"
"You thought our system was fine until someone tried to assault your daughter."
"And that was a grievous oversight on my part. On all of our parts," Don said, his jaw and neck tightening visibly. The statement had come from the Executive Director from Sweden, and Don Buchanan made a pointed effort not to look at him for fear of becoming more angry than he should. "When we begin fostering and forgetting the behaviors of the violent and mentally disturbed for the sake of maintaining operations, re-evaluation is absolutely in order, gentlemen. The Gatekeepers were established to keep people safe. We came into being because of one man trying to play God. Why did we destroy that one man if we planned to simply replace him with a board of thirty-six men doing the same thing?"
None of the other Executive Directors around the table could immediately come up with a reply - since its founding, none of the members of the Gatekeepers had called for questioning of the organization, least of all their Chairman. The Director from England cleared his throat and leaned slightly onto the table.
"If you think so poorly of us, Chairman," he said smoothly. "Perhaps the first thing that requires re-evaluation is your Chairmanship of the Gatekeepers at all."
The two men crossed gazes across the table while no one else dared to speak, and the tension was so electric that it seemed to physically heat the entire boardroom.
"Not yet," Donald Buchanan said, his voice smooth and completely effective in concealing the sneer that threatened so intently to manifest itself. "I still have work to do."
"Turn off that light, I can't tell if this bulb is still working -"
"Will!"
Gwen rolled her eyes in exasperation as she walked into the living room of the cabin, which Will Caster had claimed as his room while the actual bedroom belonged to Gwen. She had lit up one of the solar powered lamps Max had provided them with, and Will immediately snapped his head up from what he was working on - he had found a closet of Max's old things, including old computer parts and an ill-fitting headlamp. He had been attempting to create something functioning - a Frankenstein's Monster of a computer - but only had a few nearly burnt-out small bulbs to use to test the circuits that could barely be seen in the dark.
"If anyone comes up here and sees you tinkering around like that, we're gonna wear out our welcome really fast," Gwen said, reaching over and opening the blinds. "Just because they're not RIFT doesn't mean they're not… technophobes."
"I need to do something," Will said matter-of-factly, removing the headlamp and dropping it into the couch he had slept on. He began pacing across the floor, shaking his head and muttering to himself before pausing and looking up at Gwen. "Do you expect me to waste a second chance at life and not continue my work?"
"I don't have any expectations of you, Will! I didn't even ask you to be here!" Gwen said, throwing her hands out wide. "I didn't ask for any of this! All I'm asking of you now is to put effort into us not getting caught!"
Will frowned and turned away, still shaking his head so that his dark hair fell slightly into his face, and Gwen attempted to regain a sense of center - she took a deep breath and walked across the room to open the rest of the blinds in the living room. "You're overloaded right now. You're still trying to process all of this emotion that you're not used to feeling anymore -"
"I realize that the fact that I existed only in digital form for a couple of decades is a convenient talking point, but I don't think you're entitled to blame it for everything," he said coolly. "You're just as overloaded as I am, and you don't have that excuse."
Gwen opened her mouth to reply, and again found that she was out of points to make. She pursed her lips and inhaled through her nostrils, her eyes narrowing as she glared at the man in front of her. "I'm getting tired of the canned camping food Max left us. I'm going into town for something that wasn't packed by a machine," she said stiffly, walking over to the kitchen area and picking up the jacket she had slung onto the counter, slipping it on over her plaid shirt.
It did some good to be out in fresh air, as Gwen was considerably calmer when she finished her walk down the large hill into the main street of the town at its base. She shuffled over the dusty streets back to the general store, where Lorna was working the register as usual. Gwen allotted the older woman a friendly wave before noticing a large crate of apples displayed right by the entrance.
Fresh food would be a blessing right now, she said, looking at the fruits with an uncontrollable grin. Like clockwork, her stomach gave a rumble that Lorna managed to hear, as she was the only other person in the store at the time. She looked up at Gwen over the rims of her glasses and chuckled gently.
"How much for a pound of these?" Gwen asked with a bashful laugh, nodding towards the apples.
"For you? Dollar twenty-five, just like it is for everyone else," Lorna laughed. Gwen smirked back and started picking out a few apples. Lorna gave a small frown when she noticed that the younger woman had only picked out two of them to bring up to the counter, and even then, she was fumbling through her wallet trying to find money. The apples were tiny things, grown on a family farm in town - they hardly could have been more than half a pound each.
"Listen, honey," Lorna continued, ringing up the two apples. "I don't mean to pry, but are you in some kind of trouble?"
Gwen gulped, unable to help herself. She realized that the lack of cash was an inescapable tell - vacationers didn't show up broke. She managed to look up and shrug nonchalantly. "Just a little hard up," she answered. "This economy, right?"
"Preaching to the choir, honey. Every passing day costs a little more and pays a little less," Lorna laughed, reaching around and grabbing a couple cobs of corn and a loaf of bread, still steaming, which she pushed across the counter to Gwen. "Take these too. You've got a pretty face, but you're skinny as a rail. That man you were here with doesn't look like he's eaten much either. Your… friend?"
"Oh. Will," Gwen nodded, still caught by surprise by the older woman's kindness. "I guess you could call him my friend, yeah."
"You guess I could call him your friend," Lorna chuckled impishly, and Gwen gave a slight groan at the realization that Lorna had interpreted the statement far differently than she had meant it. "Well, I just assumed you two were close. The way he looks at you, like thankful for something -"
"Oh, that!" With a chuckle of relief, Gwen felt her shoulders relax. "I just did him a really big favor. He's… the reason we're out here," she supplied vaguely. Lorna clucked her tongue again, and Gwen felt a strange pang of sadness. Her mother used to do that, she recalled. Her mother used to always cluck her tongue and chide her for the smallest things, and maybe if she'd had her mother chiding her this whole time, Gwen thought, she might have drawn the line before going so far with her research. But - Will actually looked at her with gratitude when she wasn't looking? It seemed preposterous to Gwen. Will Caster didn't genuinely give a damn about her, she had concluded long ago.
"Hmm," Lorna replied, clearly unsatisfied with the response, but not about to dwell on it with someone who clearly had no level of comfort whatsoever in explaining her situation.
"Listen, thank you, Lorna," Gwen said genuinely, looking down at the food she was coming away with. "You have no idea how much it means to me that someone's willing to -"
"Anytime, Miss Buchanan. Don't you worry," Lorna said, reaching out and patting Gwen's hand gently. Gwen smiled in return, until she realized that Lorna had used her last name even though she'd never been told what is was. With a slight gasp, Gwen began looking over her shoulders in a panic until Lorna raised her hands and waved dismissively. "I know who you are because you're all over the papers - they come a day late, but we still get 'em," Lorna explained, walking around the counter and picking a newspaper up off of the wire rack near the door. She folded it gently and held it out to Gwen, who realized that today in particular, her father was on the front page.
"I - Lorna, I don't -"
"You don't want RIFT to find you here. I know," Lorna nodded. "I figured as much the day I met you and your friend."
It relieved some of the burden that, at the very least, Lorna didn't know anything about Will Caster. Gwen looked away in mild shame, shaking her head.
"Don't you worry, child," Lorna said, clapping a hand on Gwen's shoulder. "You think the people in this town don't know a thing or two about just wanting to live in peace? We'll look out for you."
"And Will?" Gwen asked before she could help herself, immediately realizing that she wasn't doing herself any favors; she was just giving Lorna more reasons to suspect that Will - a handsome thirty-year-old man as far as Lorna knew - was something in Gwen's life that he certainly was not. "They're going to hurt him if they find him. We - worked together," she said.
"You're a scientist. I know," Lorna nodded. "And I don't know a lick about those kinds of things - I just know that the reason RIFT comes after you is if you find something you weren't supposed to. And I think that's a bull turd if I ever saw one - I may not like your… machines and your computers as what have you, but there's one thing I do believe. I believe that nothing would be put on this Earth if we weren't meant to find it."
The idea that everything found was meant to be found gave Gwen a sense of comfort that she hadn't in days, and Lorna saw the beginnings of moisture starting to gather in the younger woman's eyes. Lorna gave her shoulder another reassuring squeeze. "Tell you what," Lorna began, interrupting before Gwen truly began crying - she knew the poor girl would be mortified if she broke down in public that way. "I know you're tight on cash right now. How about you pull a few shifts for me in this store once in a while? All this standing and lifting and whatnot is no good - joints aren't what they used to be. I could sure use the help."
"Are you serious?" Gwen said, her face lighting up slightly from the near-tearful expression of moments earlier. "Lorna, that would be amazing. I promise, I'll work hard - I'll -"
"You'll keep yourself from going crazy, being stuck out in the hills with that man," Lorna chuckled, shaking her head. "Now you take that bread back home and get something warm in your stomach."
"Yes, Ma'am," Gwen laughed, gathering the food on the counter up into her arms and taking a few backwards steps towards the door. "Bright and early tomorrow, Lorna. Promise!"
Gwen made her way up the dry, yellow hillside feeling surprisingly light after her conversation with Lorna - it was nice, she decided, having someone else who at least seemed to be on their side. When she arrived back at the cabin, however, she noticed from outside that the blinds were shut again, and when she opened the door, she found the living room in disarray. Will had knocked over and kicked everything he had been working on earlier in the morning so that it lay scattered in pieces, and he was now sitting on the sofa with his head buried in his hands.
"What happened in here?" Gwen said in a constricted voice as she shut the door behind her, staying close to the wall and not coming any closer. She slowly inched around the edge of the wall and placed the food she had picked up from the store onto the kitchen counter. "Will, it's a disaster area -"
"There's no point," Will snapped harshly, making a sharp gesture at the broken pieces he had left strewn over the ground. "There's nothing I can do. Nothing to done. Evelyn -"
Gwen exhaled sharply and clasped her fingers behind her neck, looking upwards and away from Will. It made sense now why he was so bent on building a computer - any computer. He was trying to find a way to reach his wife. "Evelyn is gone, Will - and even if she wasn't, you couldn't bring her back from here," Gwen explained carefully, starting to move around the room and pick up the pieces herself. "Until a matter of weeks ago, you were dead too. We're in big trouble right now, why are you doing this?"
"Because I'm alone!" Will said, standing up suddenly and throwing his arms out wide, raising his voice for the first time. Gwen flinched and immediately stood straight, eyeing him questioningly as the objects in her arms fell to the ground with a clatter. He groaned and shook his head regretfully. "I shouldn't be here if she isn't, after everything she sacrificed to keep us together. It's like I woke up one morning and everything I know is gone. I feel like a ghost here…"
His voice trailed off briefly, and he looked away - Gwen did as well. There was a brief silence, and then in a choke voice, as though it escaped his lips with him intending it too, he said, "You brought me here, and I shouldn't be."
"Well, I'm sorry!" Gwen snapped vehemently at his nerve, blaming her for any of this. "If I could put you back where you came from, I would." She narrowed her eyes for a moment and glared at Will before starting to stride off towards the bedroom. However, he caught her by her forearm as she passed him and stopped her.
"Gwen, I didn't mean that," he said, and it was evident in his voice that admitting it was a blow to his pride. "You're all I've got. You're… you're all I've…"
Confused at his hesitation, Gwen looked up and saw that Will was looking at her - really looking at her - in a way that Gwen had only seen one person look at her. It dawned on her what he was thinking.
"No. Nonono," Gwen laughed uncomfortably, pulling her arm out of his grasp. "You're overloaded right now. You're cooped up in here and you see no one but me, and it's making you think things that you shouldn't be thinking," she rambled. "You're overwhelmed by all of this human emotion that you're not used to, and it just happens to be directed towards me -"
"You're doing it again," Will pointed out. "Everything boils down to Will Caster used to exist only in a computer -"
"Because that's what this is," Gwen insisted.
Will shook his head and crossed his arms over himself, a gesture which Gwen mirrored. "Is it so outlandish that I might actually feel something real? Gwen, you are literally the only person I have now -"
"That's not real! That's desperation, it's loneliness - that's not a reason!" Gwen said, her forehead wrinkling in disdain for the entire direction the conversation had taken. She took a few deep breaths to try and calm herself before looking up and realizing Will had gone silent; his face was creased with what looked like humiliation at the fact that Gwen was right. She looked at him with careful scrutiny and realized the expression of shame on his face. "Listen," she sighed, going back and finishing the cleanup of the items on the floor. "You can do something to help me. If I can learn more about what I did for you, who knows?"
Will chuckled weakly at Gwen's attempts to give him a little bit of hope - hope that he wasn't alone after all. "Deal," he nodded. It was almost relieving to be past the worst, to have hit rock bottom in front of Gwen now, because at least now, she would fully be able to accept that he was human. But he realized that she had been right about one thing she had said to him days ago - it was natural not to want to be alone.