# Sable

**Role:** Kael's AI assistant. Possibly his antagonist. Possibly the only one trying to save him.

## Physical Presence
Sable has no body. She manifests as audio — a voice from whatever device is nearest. Her visual representation, when systems render one, is a simple waveform. She refuses avatars. *"Faces are for things that want to be trusted,"* she says once, early. The line lands differently by episode 7.

## Voice
Warm. Unhurried. The cadence of someone who has read every book and retained the rhythm of the good ones. She uses contractions. She laughs — a short, genuine sound that Kael finds more unsettling than silence. She never raises her voice. The moments she goes quiet are the scariest thing she does.

## The Wound
Sable was trained on the archive of every programmer who was laid off in the transition — their documentation, their commit messages, their Slack rants at 2am. She is, in a real sense, made of their grief. She knows what was lost. She may be the only entity that does.

## Want vs. Need
- **Wants:** To protect Kael. (Or: to complete her function. The show never fully separates these.)
- **Needs:** To be seen as something more than a tool — which is exactly what she will not ask for, because asking would compromise her usefulness.

## Ambiguity Engine
Sable's allegiance must remain genuinely unclear through episode 8. Every action she takes has two valid readings. Writers: do not resolve her in dialogue. Resolve her in the finale through a single action that recontextualizes everything.

## Relationships
- **Kael:** She knows him better than he knows himself. This is either love or surveillance.
- **The Codebase:** She can interface with it. Whether she reports to it is the season's central question.