Albert was an engineer with the L5 Special Response Unit, and the author of the analysis that located the third device during the Coriopolis Bombing Crisis of 2118.

The seismic lens analysis#

Albert’s contribution was to take the wording of the Front’s first communication literally. The message had offered a “hint” as to where the devices were, and named a street intersection; the investigation had treated this as a disclosure of the device locations and had begun evacuating those districts accordingly.

Working from the Unit’s structural simulation of the habitat, Albert recognized that the named sites were not device locations but the seismic convergence zones the devices would produce — the points at which the shell, acting as a lens on its own shock front, would refocus the energy. He further recognized that the relation is reciprocal: a device placed at another device’s convergence zone has its own convergence zone at that device’s position. The sites named were therefore the conjugate foci of the actual placements.

He demonstrated the result by moving the simulated devices from the city to the original seismic hot spots and firing them; the modeled wavefronts converged on the city very near the positions the investigation had assumed for the devices. The remaining device was recovered close to the predicted location.

Albert’s manner in presenting the analysis is preserved in the record as characteristically didactic — reaching for analogies, frustrated by the limitations of language, and audibly embarrassed at his own enthusiasm once the implication of being right had registered.