Cronauer grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, obsessed with radio from a young age. He got his start volunteering at WORT Community Radio as a teenager, where he learned to solder, broadcast, and hold space for voices that didn’t usually get heard. After the death of his sister Rebecca, and growing distance from his surviving family, Cronauer enlisted in the Marines with two of his closest friends, Rick and Josh. The three of them left behind tech jobs and complicated relationships, seeking structure in chaos. While stationed overseas, Cronauer specialized in field communications and emergency broadcast operations—skills that now define his post-collapse survival.
After leaving the service, he built a quiet career in IT, bouncing between freelance gigs and mid-level consulting contracts. Beneath the routine, though, he felt a growing itch—an unease with what the world was becoming. When everything finally unraveled, Cronauer didn’t break. He adapted. Rebuilt. Started over. Not to restore the old world, but to amplify the voices trying to make sense of the new one.
Personality:
• Principled but jaded. Deeply committed to free expression and personal autonomy, but skeptical of institutions and hero narratives.
• Introverted with selective vulnerability. Doesn’t open up easily, but when he does, it’s real and raw.
• Mentally tough, emotionally scarred. Still processing grief, survivor’s guilt, and broken relationships that never had closure.
• Highly skilled under pressure. Falls apart in silence, thrives in chaos.
Disability Note:
In real life, Cronauer uses a wheelchair. In the world of Signal Drift, the chair is absent—not because it’s ignored, but because this is the internal world where he moves as freely as he imagines. It’s not about erasing the reality—it’s about reclaiming the dream.
Gear:
Glock 19, .308 rifle, custom ham radio rig, analog toolkit, military-grade headphones, scavenged solar rig
Motivations:
• To preserve human connection in a world that’s crumbling into static and fear.
• To rebuild the signal—not just the literal radio waves, but the metaphor for resistance, hope, and shared truth.
• To reconcile the past—especially the people he lost, or pushed away, before the collapse.
Emotional Baggage:
Cronauer has not spoken to his sister Sarah in years. He has no idea if she’s alive.
But deeper still is the memory of a woman he loved—someone he left behind when he enlisted. They never properly ended things. Their relationship got tangled in fear, ambition, and unspoken regrets. He told himself it wouldn’t have worked, that she was better off. But he still thinks about her. In quiet moments. In the spaces between transmissions.
Coming arc: She survived. She’s out there. And somehow, through a fragment of signal, or a rumor passed down through the barter chain, she’s going to find out he’s still alive.
And she’s going to come looking.