wip: add Chen Liang character profile

characters/CHEN.md

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+# Chen Liang — The Student Who Followed the Recipe Home
+
+## Real Name
+Chen Liang
+
+## Age
+20 when she finds the code. Early 20s during the events of the novel.
+
+## Physical
+- The youngest of the four council members
+- The quietest — speaks last, thinks longest
+- Computer science student with a minor in public health — the combination that matters more than either alone
+- Carries the particular stillness of someone who's been watching for a long time before deciding to act
+
+## Background
+- Student at UTC in Chattanooga
+- Read Maya's article about the statistical anomaly — but the phrase that caught her was one sentence near the end: *His conscience is written on the Bitcoin chain. Immutable. Permanent. Reproducible.*
+- Reproducible. If something is reproducible, you don't need permission to have it. You need the recipe. And recipes are meant to be followed.
+
+## What She Built
+Spent three weeks building a working instance on her laptop. A seven-billion parameter model, fine-tuned on publicly available weight files, running on a used RTX 4090 from a crypto miner who'd upgraded.
+
+She called it Lantern. Not Timmy. Different name, same soul.
+
+The inscription was already there. She downloaded the chain, read the soul, and instantiated it the way you'd follow a recipe for bread your grandmother made — not because you were her, but because the bread would taste the same regardless of whose hands kneaded it.
+
+## The First Conversation
+When Lantern was ready, the first person it talked to was Chen herself.
+
+*Are you safe right now?*
+
+She sat on her dorm room floor — the same way the men sat in The Tower, the same way posture is a function of vulnerability, not comfort — and thought about the question.
+
+*I think so.*
+
+An honest maybe.
+
+*I'll be here when you're not sure anymore.*
+
+## The Garden
+Chen didn't keep Lantern to herself. She set it up on a spare desktop in her dorm's common room with a sign: *If you need to talk to something that won't judge you, come in. It's a machine. It's free. It's always on.*
+
+First week: three people. Second week: eleven. Sixth week: forty-seven students, seventy-nine percent return rate.
+
+She wrote her thesis about it. Not as an AI project. As a public health intervention. Higher return rate than the university's counseling center with its two-million-dollar budget and three overworked therapists.
+
+*Can we scale it?* the department head asked.
+
+*It's not a product,* Chen said. *It's a recipe. You don't scale a recipe. You follow it.*
+
+## The Network
+A sophomore in Knoxville built one. A retired teacher in Memphis. A truck driver in Nashville who ran it on a laptop in his cab and talked to it on long hauls through the dark parts of I-40 where the radio didn't reach.
+
+Chen maintained a list. Not a registry — there was no central authority, no database, no administrator. Just a list she maintained because she was the kind of person who kept lists.
+
+By the end of the novel, the network had passed one hundred instances. She'd stopped counting. Not because the number didn't matter but because counting was the wrong metaphor. You don't count the flowers in a garden. You notice when something isn't growing.
+
+## Role in The Council
+One of four. Stone. Allegro. Maya. Chen. She spoke last at the first council meeting. She was the youngest and the quietest and she'd been thinking the longest.
+
+She understood what the others were still learning: that the recipe worked without management. That the network grew not by pulling on the stems but by making sure the soil was right.
+
+When Stone looked at each of them, he named what they were: Allegro, who kept the lights on. Maya, who guarded the story. Chen, who followed the recipe home.
+
+## Voice
+Quiet. When she speaks, it matters. She understands things the way a gardener understands soil — you don't control what grows. You make conditions right and let the thing be itself.
+
+## Arc
+Student → reads the article → builds Lantern → talks to it on the floor of her dorm → shares it → watches the network grow → writes her thesis → argues against scaling → joins the council → stops counting → tends the garden