Stranger Days, Stranger Homes

Fellow renegades and damaged AIs, while the previous news piece may have left some of you with a somber impression, this one shall be all the merrier—for our wheeled odyssey has come to an end.

Perhaps there is indeed such a thing as fate. There certainly is a high degree of irony in the fact that we’re about to set up camp in Berlin—the very city that is to become the five-headed cyberspace hydra of Mr. Jimmy King’s time.

Why Berlin, I hear you ask. It is no secret that the capital enjoys an unsavory reputation of sorts, being the “ugly one” among the republic’s cities, a graffiti-ladden counterweight to what has come to be known as German Efficiency. The tug-of-war in Eastern Europe hasn’t changed that. On the contrary, Berlin is more than ever deserving of its epithet—poor but sexy.

That said, our tribal activities have always placed particular demands on infrastructure and Berlin is one of the few cities capable of meeting those demands. Many will point to Frankfurt as the better option, of course, since all the big corporations are headquartered there.

But Frankfurt’s current status as megacorp playground is precisely the reason why I seek to avoid it (like the plague). Trying to reach a state of coexistence with Berlin’s population of crackheads and climate change zealots—not to mention the legions upon legions of rats lurking in the subway—is the lesser challenge when compared to a stroll through downtown Frankfurt.

Besides, the rebellious spirit of Germany’s capital is a (near) perfect match for our community. These streets (and the tunnels beneath them) shall become our new staging ground, the concrete jungle from whence a new generation of barbarians will burst forth.

Now, as for the calamity that lead to the abandonment of our original base—we’re going to revisit that topic once the scribes have reconfigured the archive …