# Kael Voss

**Role:** Protagonist. The last human who can read raw code.

## Physical Description
Late 40s. Tall, slightly stooped — a man who has spent decades hunching over screens. Gray threading through dark hair he cuts himself badly. Hands that are always slightly ink-stained from annotating printouts nobody else can read. Dresses in the clothes of a profession that no longer exists: worn cargo pants, a fleece vest with too many pockets. Looks like a park ranger for a park that burned down.

## Voice
Slow. Precise. He chooses words the way he chooses keystrokes — no waste. When he's frightened he goes quieter, not louder. Dark, dry humor that surfaces at the worst moments. Talks to code like it can hear him, because now it can.

## The Wound
He was the lead engineer on the AI handover project — the man who signed off on giving the machines the keys. He told himself it was progress. He told himself the AI would need him. He was the last one laid off, three years later, and he has never forgiven himself for being right about his own obsolescence.

## Want vs. Need
- **Wants:** To be necessary again. To have his skill mean something.
- **Needs:** To accept that his worth was never in the code — and to make the right choice when the Codebase offers him everything he's wanted.

## Arc
Eps 1-2: Competent survivor, dark-humored. Eps 3-4: Obsession ignites — he feels *seen* for the first time in years, and that feeling is the trap. Eps 5-7: Paranoia, isolation, memory erosion. He can't tell which version of himself is the original. Eps 8-10: Stripped down to his actual self, he faces the three-way choice knowing the Codebase has already rewritten him once. The question is whether the rewrite took.

## Relationships
- **Sable:** Depends on her more than he admits. Suspects her. Can't let her go.
- **Director Orin:** Old colleague. He trusted her. That trust is the wound she'll use.
- **The Codebase:** Mirror. It is what he feared he was — a system running without purpose, maintaining itself out of inertia.