Early and late 21st century Earth.

In the early 21st century a young metalworker called Mark Pine experienced an unfortunate and eventually tragic workplace accident. In an effort to understand the cause and treat the coma he had lapsed a series of novel brain imaging techniques were employed that ultimately proved futile. This data was eventually archived, stored, transferred into a set of cardboard boxes and ultimately forgotten.

At least, until in the late 21st century a group of students at the very same university went in search for old brain data. See, digital resurrection had been done, however existing techniques required a still living brain and lots of recording to exactly reproduce the neural activity of said soon to be dead person. This wouldn't work for those already dead. These students decided to go a different route. Rather than faithfully reproducing a person neuron by neuron they took a blank AGI template, processed brain scans to extract memories and personality and imprinted those onto the AGI. Then they used archived social media information on the person to tweak and fill gaps in it's memory. The end result after a lot of tweaking and some false starts was an AI who wholeheartedly believed they were the deceased.

Philosophers and ethicists were going to have a field-day with this. But first they wanted to introduce their AGI, Pine, to the real world. For this they needed a physical body...