Kyle
Title: Commander in the Disciple Army
Age: Mid-30s
Appearance: Shaven head, steel-gray eyes sharp as flint. Weathered face marked by hardship, with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Military-worn jacket patched crudely with mismatched thread. Cigarette always lit or close by—smoke as constant as his breath. His hands are steady but scarred, hands that have both wielded weapons and healed wounds.
Voice: Low, measured, rarely raised. When Kyle speaks, his words cut through the noise.
Aura: Coiled tension—quiet, deliberate, and unwavering.
Personality and Role:
Kyle is the cold logic in the fire of rebellion. He is not the impassioned orator, but the silent force who sees the battlefield as a series of calculated risks. His leadership style is minimalistic—he commands through presence and unyielding resolve rather than speeches. Soldiers follow him because they trust his instincts, honed by countless close calls.
Before the Collapse, Kyle was a defense technician—a man who understood the mechanisms of control and warfare at the deepest levels. His knowledge became a weapon for the Disciples, and his past haunts him with the knowledge of humanity’s lost innocence. He bears the weight of knowing the cost of their survival is steep.
Though outwardly tough and often detached, Kyle holds a protective tenderness for those vulnerable—young recruits, the broken, the haunted. He guards them fiercely but silently, rarely offering comfort beyond steady companionship.
Biography
Kyle was born and raised in the American Midwest, the youngest of three brothers in a working-class family. His father was a mechanic; his mother, a nurse. From them, Kyle learned the value of simplicity — how to make things work, how to listen, and how to notice what others overlooked.
He joined the Air Force out of high school, specializing in avionics repair, and later transitioned into civilian engineering contracts. It was during his time at a research base in Nevada that he met Clark Johnson, who brought him onto the GEIST Initiative as a systems technician. Kyle’s job was to maintain the physical stability of the resonance arrays — the machinery that allowed human consciousness to be mapped against the quantum field.
Kyle never believed in the mystical aspects of GEIST. To him, it was an experiment in human perception, nothing more. But when the first resonance spike occurred — when people began vanishing, when time itself fractured inside the test chamber — something changed in him.
He heard the hum of the field. He began dreaming in symbols: spirals, eyes, ancient letters that burned into his memory.
After the GEIST incident, Kyle remained one of the few survivors. Haunted but functional, he became Martin Cole’s closest companion — a man who didn’t understand the higher order of what was happening, but refused to let Martin face it alone.
Where Martin sought transcendence, Kyle sought truth.
And in GEIST, those two paths often lead to the same door.
Short Story: “The Sound Beneath the World”
The desert was quiet now. Too quiet.
Kyle crouched beside the remains of a resonance tower, running his hand over the metal — warped, but still warm. The hum was still there, faint but steady, buried deep beneath the earth. He could feel it in his bones more than hear it, a pulse like a sleeping heartbeat.
He switched on his headset. “Clark, I’m at the southern grid. Power cells are gone. But the core’s still active.”
Static, then Clark’s voice, low and tight. “That’s impossible. We pulled the power last night.”
Kyle stood, looking out toward the horizon. The air shimmered faintly. “Tell that to the ground. It’s still alive down here.”
He turned as he heard footsteps behind him.
Martin Cole emerged from the haze — eyes hollow, coat whipping in the wind, looking like he hadn’t slept in days.
“Martin,” Kyle said carefully, “please tell me you didn’t restart the array.”
Martin didn’t answer at first. He just stared at the desert — at something only he could see. “It’s not the array,” he murmured. “It’s… remembering itself.”
Kyle frowned. “Machines don’t remember.”
Martin looked at him then, and there was something in his eyes — something vast and mournful. “This one does.”
They stood in silence, the wind shifting around them. The hum grew louder, almost imperceptibly — the kind of sound that doesn’t enter through the ears, but through the spine.
“I keep dreaming about it,” Kyle said softly. “About the lights. The symbols. It’s like it’s trying to talk to me.”
Martin’s expression softened. “It is.”
Kyle laughed once, dryly. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s not meant to be,” Martin replied. “You were there when it opened. It touched you. It left a mark.”
Kyle turned away, shaking his head. “I fix machines, Martin. I don’t talk to ghosts.”
But as he said it, he felt the hum shift — the tone sliding up into a pure, crystalline note. And for the briefest moment, the sand beneath his boots glowed with faint green light, forming the outline of a circle — twelve points, interconnected.
He froze. “What the hell is that?”
Martin stepped closer, eyes wide with recognition. “The Field,” he whispered. “It’s waking up again.”
Kyle stared at the glowing symbol, heart pounding. “Then what do we do?”
Martin smiled — not with joy, but with the grim serenity of someone who already knows the cost.
“We listen.”
And as the desert wind rose, the hum turned into a chord — deep, vast, and alive — the voice of something older than the world, calling them both back into the light.