Tobias Kone

Overview

Tobias Kone is a mining systems technician and the youngest member of Cade Brennan’s inner circle. At 28, he’s belt-born – raised on Vesta Station, second-generation contract worker – and he’s never set foot on Earth. What he lacks in years he makes up for in technical brilliance and a genuine belief that the truth matters.

Background

Tobias was born on Vesta Station to a family of contract workers. His mother, Adama Kone, died in a mining accident in 2169. His father, Samuel Kone, still works on Vesta. The family is of West African heritage – Ghanaian-Ivorian, from Kumasi – and like many belt-born families, they’ve maintained cultural continuity across the generations. His grandmother chose his name, following Ghanaian Christian naming traditions.

Growing up on Vesta gave Tobias a front-row seat to belt life at its most honest: industrial, dangerous, and stripped of corporate pretense. It also gave him access to data systems, which became his calling.

Physical Description

Tobias has the physiology of someone raised in low gravity: tall and thin, with long fingers suited to delicate equipment work. He has dark brown skin and close-cropped hair. He moves with the fluid grace of someone who’s never known full-g. People consistently underestimate him because he looks younger than his age. He wears glasses for close work – belt-born often develop myopia.

Personality

Tobias genuinely believes that truth has power – that exposure forces change. His first instinct when he finds something wrong is to document it, preserve the evidence, and prepare it for the light. He speaks quickly when excited, especially about technical subjects, and uses data metaphors unconsciously: “corrupted,” “cached,” “backed up.”

He’s more comfortable with systems than people. In confrontational situations, he falls back on structured argument and formal speech. Small talk is not his strength.

His belt-born accent is distinctive: elongated vowels, swallowed consonants, and the technical slang that marks someone who grew up surrounded by machinery.

Relationships

Cade Brennan is his mentor – someone whose competence Tobias respects and whose experience he learns from. Seren Varga initially strikes him as reckless, though over time he comes to see her absolutism differently. His relationship with his father, Samuel, is complicated: Samuel survived the belt by keeping his head down, and Tobias both understands this and chafes against it.