a visit to c-base (August 2001)

On Sunday night, after seeing Stephanie off at the Stadtmitte station, I set out to find the C-Base. I called Thomas on my mobile telephone, and he gave me directions. I was standing in entryway to the U-Bahn on Friedrichstraße and wind was blasting out of the station. The directions took nearly five minutes, but in the end I only understood that I had to find some bridge, and then ``the second courtyard, third floor.'' I consulted the Berlin city trains map, hoping that something familiar would catch my attention. Remarkably, my eyes fell at once on the Jannowitzbrücke station, and I knew immediately that this was the bridge (brücke) I needed to find. The U-2 came shortly, and I rode it one hop east to Alexanderplatz, then the S-bahn another hop to Jannowitzbrücke.

I'd met Thomas at Hackers At Large a week ago in the Netherlands, in the CCC camp. He had explained that he was not from the Chaos Computer Club but rather the ``C-Base,'' although he added that the two groups occassionally collaborated on joint projets, such as the giant monolith standing just outside the dome. When I asked what the c-base is, he answered: ``The C-Base is a space ship from the future that crashed in central Berlin.'' Slightly confused, I queried further, and he elaborated: ``It travelled through time but not space, before it crashed. Now we are escavating it. It has seven sectors. We hold workshops there sometimes.'' With that explanation, I had to add c-base to my berlin itinerary to see this thing for myself.

By now it was well into dusk in Berlin, with the clouds blowing across the western sky every shade of blue, but all of it fading to grey. The TV tower stared down at me, and . I walked a block down Holzmarktstraße before realizing it was the wrong street. I came then to Rungestraße

This isn't finished, and it might never be. -- Tobin

Reposted from http://splorg.org:8080/people/tobin/travel/c-base.html