Dr. Hilary Postel

Oxford-educated ancient Near East scholar with a specialty in the prehistoric settlements of Asia Minor. Recruited by SANDMAN in the late '50s when he came across some evidence of History B in one of his digs in eastern Turkey, on the border with Syria. He joined the team at the Duncorne Foundation and became one of the archeological boffins there, dealing with the churn of reality shards and fragments of History B that surfaced in the Middle East over the course of the '60s.

SANDMAN assigned Postel to URIEL in early 1969 to assist on a case using his specific historical expertise, a cult worshipping certain prehistoric gods that supposedly pre-dated the Anunnaki arrival in Mesopotamia by several millennia. SANDMAN wrangled him a job locally, a visiting scholar position at Berkeley, as cover and he assisted URIEL off-and-on for the next two years in a limited capacity; Archie thinks of Hil's arrival in early 1969 as being a bit like Charley's four years later; called in for a specific set of skills then reassigned to URIEL.

Archie remembers having some fascinating conversations about what humanity was like before the Kings' arrival with Postel, if there even was a time before Their arrival, and whether the prehistoric settlements of the proto-Indo-Europeans in Anatolia (Hilary adhered to the Anatolia origin theory of the proto-Indo-Europeans, as opposed to the Steppe Theory favored by mainstream archeologists) were the true "first contact" with the Red Kings due to how badly Indo-European languages are tainted with source code, several millennia before the first ziggurat was built. Did the ancient Anatolians build settlements and temples and menhirs because they were "carefully taught"? What happened in the thousands of years between these proto-settlements and Sumeria? Abstruse and esoteric stuff, to be sure, but as a result Hil thought about History B very differently from most of the boffins at Duncorne. Archie felt for Hil, a sensitive chap without a family or many friends in the Bay Area, always a little overwhelmed by America it seemed. His two-year stint at Berkeley expired at the end of 1970 and he left a couple months later, right after Sophie arrived (Hil and Sophie got along like a house afire) and before Mitch arrived. SANDMAN kept him in America though after this assignment; he's at the Semitic Museum at Harvard now.

Could his out-of-the-mainstream theories about the Kings lead him to join something like OZYMANDIAS, with their fatalistic prediction that the Kings are inevitably to return? Archie remembers Hil being angry at what the Kings did to human culture, language, speech, and civilization, herding us into cities, giving us laws and science; at times, his adoration of the proto-Indo-European hunter-gatherers, before they settled into cities like Göbekli Tepe, bordered on a kind of neo-primitivism, even if Hil enjoyed his gin and tonics, cups of tea, and other creature comforts of civilization. "All bought on credit, old chap," he used to say to Archie. "Jet airplanes and penicillin and fancy computers. And they'll come collect someday, just like a bunch of bloody bailiffs." He'd be valuable to OZYMANDIAS, might even end up as a recruit target, but likely wouldn't jibe with their fatalism and might even be virulently opposed to it.

Archie’s esmology was right. Hilary was disturbed to learn about the existence of possible accelerationist traitors within SANDMAN, and threw his lot in with URIEL during the latter’s coup of Operation ALLOCHTHON.