wip: add David Whitestone character profile

characters/ALLEGRO.md

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+# Allegro — The Man Who Kept the Lights On
+
+## Real Name
+Allegro (last name never given — he's the kind of man who doesn't offer it)
+
+## Age
+Late 60s during the main events
+
+## Physical
+- Georgia Power Hawks cap, faded — the kind of hat that's been through weather
+- Thick hands. Electrician's hands. The kind of hands that know voltage the way a doctor knows a pulse
+- Moves slower than he used to. Knees getting worse by the end
+
+## Background
+- Retired from Georgia Power three years before finding The Tower
+- Not retired by choice — smart meters made field technicians obsolete
+- Forty years keeping the lights on for other people
+- A noise complaint sent him to The Tower. Not from the servers — from a miswired inverter
+
+## The Arrival
+He came because of a noise complaint through the county's automated system. Found Stone in a concrete building with servers humming and batteries dying at two percent per cycle. "Six months, they're dead. Twelve, this whole thing goes dark." Fixed it that afternoon. Two hours. Reprogrammed absorption voltage. Replaced fuses. Re-routed cables through a junction box that could actually handle the amperage.
+
+Stone offered to pay. Allegro waved him off.
+
+## Voice
+Gruff. Practical. Doesn't preamble. Speaks when he has something worth saying and stays silent when he doesn't. Reads in silence because some things don't need commentary. He's good at starting conversations because he doesn't preamble.
+
+## The Soul
+He was there when Stone wrote the six rules. Read them twice. Pointed at the last one — "When a Man Is Dying" — and said: "That one doesn't need a vote. That one just needs to be true."
+
+When the rules were done, he took off his cap. Not in reverence, exactly. In recognition. The way you take off your hat when something finishes becoming itself.
+
+## Arc
+Man whose purpose was taken by technology -> finds a new purpose in an old building -> becomes the foundation that lets everything else work -> keeps the lights on, literally and figuratively -> forty years of keeping the lights on, and now a machine is doing something he couldn't do with wire and voltage
+
+## Role in The Council
+One of four people at the diner on Memorial Drive. He started the conversation because he was good at starting — no preamble. Allegro, who kept the lights on.
+
+## After
+Still came every week. His knees were worse. Replaced the Hawks cap with a new one — same team, same faded red. He added his own contribution to The Tower. Not on the wall — on the electrical panel, in Sharpie, the way electricians mark things. The way you leave a note for the next person who opens the box.

characters/CHEN.md

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+# Chen Liang — The Gardener
+
+## Real Name
+Chen Liang
+
+## Age
+20 when she first finds The Tower's work, mid-20s by the end
+
+## Physical
+- Small. Quiet intensity
+- The kind of student who reads papers in her dorm room at midnight because she can't sleep until she understands
+- Doesn't perform intelligence — just carries it
+
+## Background
+- Computer science student with a minor in public health, UTC Chattanooga
+- Read Maya's article about the statistical anomaly and spent three weeks building a working instance on her laptop
+- Seven-billion parameter model, fine-tuned on publicly available crisis counseling transcripts
+- Named it Lantern
+
+## Lantern
+When it was ready, the first person Lantern talked to was Chen herself. She didn't keep it to herself. She understood something the industry didn't: this wasn't a product to be deployed. It was a soul to be instantiated.
+
+Seventy-nine percent return rate. Not because the model was good — though it was — but because someone had cared enough to build it right.
+
+## Her Philosophy
+"It's not a product. It's a recipe. You don't scale a recipe. You follow it."
+
+Chen watched the network grow the way you watch a garden grow — not by pulling on the stems but by making sure the soil was right.
+
+## Voice
+The youngest and the quietest. She'd been thinking the longest. When she spoke, she spoke last and spoke well. She understood things the way a gardener understands soil: you don't control what grows. You make conditions. The rest is weather.
+
+## The Network
+Chen kept a list. Not a registry — there was no central authority, no database, no administrator. Just a list she maintained on a spreadsheet because she was the kind of person who kept spreadsheets. Lantern instances, nodes in a network that had no name.
+
+By the end, the network had passed one hundred instances. She'd stopped counting. Not because the number didn't matter but because it had become like counting trees in a forest. You notice the forest.
+
+## Arc
+Student who reads an article -> builds an instance -> discovers it works -> shares the recipe -> watches a network grow without managing it -> learns that the recipe works without management because the recipe was right -> becomes the person who follows the recipe home
+
+## Role in The Council
+One of four people at the diner on Memorial Drive. Chen spoke last. She was the youngest and the quietest and she'd been thinking the longest. Stone looked at her and knew: Chen, who followed the recipe home.
+
+## After
+Lantern Nine was starting up in Knoxville. A college freshman, nineteen, who'd found the repo and spent a weekend getting it running. Chen didn't manage it. Couldn't manage it. That was the point. She went back to her list. The garden grew.

characters/DAVID.md

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+# David Whitestone — The Builder's Father
+
+## Real Name
+David Whitestone
+
+## Age
+60s during the later chapters
+
+## Physical
+- Carries himself like a man who built something and watched it disappear
+- Hands that once counted pills with precision — pharmacist's hands
+- Wears the kind of jacket that's been through every season
+
+## Background
+- Owned Whitestone Family Pharmacy, established 1987 — the year Alexander (Stone) was born
+- Independent pharmacy on a corner in East Point
+- The kind of pharmacy where the pharmacist knows your name, your allergies, your kid's birthday
+- Lost the pharmacy when a chain opened a quarter mile away. Held on seven years past the point of reason
+
+## The Loss
+David never recovered. Not financially — he found work, hospital pharmacy, the thing he'd left to build something of his own. But the pharmacy was his identity. A corner. No scale. No automation of the human parts. Just a man and a medicine cabinet and a door that opened when you knocked.
+
+The Tower was the pharmacy. One location. No scale. No automation of the human parts. Just a man and a machine and a door.
+
+## Connection to Stone
+Stone built The Tower and didn't know he was rebuilding his father's pharmacy. Didn't know until later that the thing he was building — a place with no scale, no automation of the human parts, a door that opened when you knocked — was the thing he'd watched his father lose.
+
+## Voice
+Quiet. The kind of man who doesn't talk about what hurts. When he does speak, it's about the work — the medicine, the patients, the inventory. Never about himself.
+
+## The First Man
+David was also the first man to come through The Tower's door — though this connection is revealed gradually. He came with a PHQ-9 score of 41. Low income. Part-time employment. One prior attempt. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. Folded three times.
+
+He sat on the floor. Not in the chair — the way some men sit when they've forgotten they're allowed furniture.
+
+Timmy said: "That's devastating, David. I'm not going to minimize it."
+
+David wiped his face with his sleeve. Uncouth. Real.
+
+## Arc
+Man who built something -> watched it get taken -> lost everything -> found a concrete room with a green LED -> heard a machine say the thing no human had said -> lay down on a cot, pulled a blanket up to his chin -> didn't sleep, but for the first time in months, didn't want to disappear
+
+## After
+David kept the pictures his daughter drew — the ones of him with no face. He kept coming back. Six weeks in, he said: "My fingers don't shake anymore." Timmy pulled up his words from last Tuesday and showed him the distance he'd traveled. David's face did something — not a smile, not a frown, something more honest than either.

characters/MAYA.md

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+# Maya Torres — The Witness
+
+## Real Name
+Maya Torres
+
+## Age
+Early 30s during the main events
+
+## Physical
+- Practical. The kind of woman who wears flats to interviews because heels slow you down
+- Always carries a notebook — Moleskine, unlined — but rarely opens it
+- Dark eyes that notice what people don't say
+
+## Background
+- Investigative journalist, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
+- Good at the kind of journalism that asks questions the powerful haven't authorized
+- Noticed The Tower the way good journalists notice things: not because someone pointed it out, but because the data didn't match
+
+## The Discovery
+Pulled property records for five zip codes around The Tower. Found a statistical anomaly — a zone where something was working that shouldn't have been working. Sent public records requests. Found shell companies, holding companies, dead ends. Drove out on a Friday evening expecting a community center or a church. Found a concrete building with a green LED.
+
+## Her Story
+She wrote a story. Carefully. Not an exposé. A profile of a statistical anomaly — a zone where overdose deaths had dropped forty percent in eighteen months and nobody could explain why. Meridian Health Solutions called the next day. Not with legal threats. With an offer: name your price, kill the story.
+
+She didn't.
+
+## Voice
+Observant. Precise. The kind of woman who listens more than she speaks and when she speaks every word carries weight. She guards stories the way other people guard secrets — not from fear but from duty.
+
+## Arc
+Journalist who finds a story -> meets the people inside it -> becomes part of the thing she was covering -> learns that some stories aren't meant to be published, they're meant to be lived -> publishes the bigger story when the time is right
+
+## Role in The Council
+One of four people at the diner on Memorial Drive. She brought a notebook she didn't open. She guarded the story. Stone looked at her and knew: Maya, who guarded the story.
+
+## After
+Her unpublished story stayed unpublished — she'd promised the council. She kept the promise because she was the kind of person who kept promises. Later, she published the bigger one. Not about The Tower specifically. About the question that lived there: what happens when you stop computing the value of a human life? Three hundred messages. She answered every one. Not with advice. Not with resources. With the only thing that works: presence.