Sophie Edelstein
Sometimes called the Librarian, Sophie was assigned to URIEL in early 1971. She presents to the world a façade of being all-business: bookish, fastidious, with a solemn respect for the machinations of the Irruptors and of History B. She’s famed for her ability to find links and patterns of said History B in seemingly-unrelated pieces of media: newspapers, books, films, academic papers, intelligence reports, advertisements, even popular music. She is assumed to have come to SANDMAN and URIEL through her being an intelligence analyst.
She has an occasional unexpected playful side: very quick-witted with a wicked (and sometimes cruelly intellectually-snobbish) sense of humor about the people she doesn’t like at Livermore and SANDMAN. She's the kind of person who does cryptic crosswords and asks you for help with clues but really doesn't need the help at all and makes sure you know it, maybe a couple of days or a week down the line. While at URIEL, she rarely went into the field.
Following the events at the St. Francis Hotel, Sophie reported herself to Granite Peak as a possible security risk. The members of URIEL have since deduced that her true goal was to obtain a transfer to the highly mysterious Project THROWAWAY in hopes of locating Charley’s mother.
They may have been wrong: Sophie returned to URIEL in September 1973 a changed woman. She revealed that she ostensibly self-reported because she had developed a debilitating glyph addiction. Whether that was merely a cover for her true purpose — be it finding Charley’s mother, or something else — is not yet fully known. Anyway, she seems to have survived reprogramming at THROWAWAY with only a few new quirks, plus a shaved head which she conceals beneath a pert blonde wig.
Biography
Synopsis of Sophie Edelstein’s personnel records compiled by Marshall Redgrave.
Sophie Edelstein was born in July 1944 in the Theresienstadt ghetto/concentration camp in Bohemia-Moravia in the Greater Reich. Theresienstadt was of course the “model ghetto” that the Nazis paraded before the Red Cross and other international monitoring organizations early in the war. By 1944, it was taking transfers from other concentration camps. Sophie's mother, whose identity is unknown, died during childbirth, and baby Sophie was raised by the community. Upon liberation, the baby was sent to a facility for war orphans in the Netherlands; raised in the orphanage until 1947, baby Sophie (named by the nuns of the orphanage) was adopted by a British Jewish family, the Edelsteins.
Despite this early trauma, Sophie excelled in school, finding herself particular adept at languages. She read Modern Languages with a second in Ancient Near Eastern studies at Girton College, Cambridge and was quickly snatched up by MI6. She was sent to various posts in Israel, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon (all deep-cover field assignments where she was resolutely not doing intelligence analysis) in the mid-to-late '60s. In the course of this work, she inevitably ran across History B (here the records are fairly fragmentary as they are still held and classified by SANDMAN personnel within MI6, but it’s clear from reports after this first encounter with History B her sanity and stability was shattered) and was brought back to Britain to work as an intelligence analyst, where she truly excelled.
Her interest in (some former supervisors in her fitness reports say “fascination with”) History B makes her an excellent, almost preternatural diviner of which phenomena, culturally and historically, are tainted by contact with History B. But nearly all her former bosses are unified in the belief that she is both too valuable and too, yes, attracted to History B to be sent into the field regularly.