Berkeley
Pre-Collapse Identity
UC Berkeley was the world's premier public research university — Nobel laureates, Free Speech Movement, People's Park, and a tradition of academic excellence inseparable from political confrontation. Telegraph Avenue was counterculture commerce. The Berkeley Hills were where professors lived in houses they could no longer afford.
Current Character
Berkeley's identity as an intellectual and countercultural center survived the Cascade, though barely and at great cost. The university ruins house independent researchers, underground schools, and resistance cells that treat corporate authority with the same contempt their predecessors reserved for the Vietnam draft. Telegraph Avenue is still a marketplace of ideas — and weapons, and forged documents, and encrypted data packages. The hills provide defensible terrain that Guardian's patrols have never fully penetrated, not for lack of force but because every incursion sparks broader resistance that costs more to suppress than the territory is worth. The flats below are contested between Ironclad's industrial creep and the bay floor's ungoverned communities.
Terrain & Atmosphere
The Berkeley Hills rise steeply to 500 meters, covered in eucalyptus and chaparral that has reclaimed the upper slopes. Fire is a constant danger — the same vegetation that provides cover from surveillance becomes tinder in dry season. The campus sprawls across the transition between hills and flats, its brutalist concrete buildings serving as natural fortifications. The flats descend toward the bay floor's northern edge, a gradual slope that Guardian and Ironclad push into from opposite directions.
Corporate Presence
No corporation dominates, and that is Berkeley's defining feature. Nexus maintains data infrastructure — the university's old fiber optic backbone was too valuable to abandon — but operational control of the campus and surrounding neighborhoods remains in the hands of independent communities, faculty collectives, and resistance organizations. Guardian's surveillance presence is a border phenomenon: cameras on the ridgeline road, patrols at the sector boundaries, but not inside.
Key Locations
The University Ruins (UC Berkeley campus — independent research, underground schools, resistance stronghold), Telegraph Avenue corridor (counterculture commerce and information exchange), the Ridgeline (Berkeley Hills — defensive terrain, eucalyptus cover, fire risk).
Sensory Detail
The smell of eucalyptus is everywhere — sharp, medicinal, masking the chemical tang that drifts up from the bay floor. Sound on campus is human-scale: lectures held in open courtyards, arguments about philosophy that become arguments about tactics, the scratch of chalk on real blackboards. Up in the hills, the wind moves through eucalyptus canopy with a sound like static. Down on the flats, you can hear the Dregs.
Daily Life
People here still teach, still argue, still believe that knowing how the world works is the first step toward changing it — and they back that belief with barricades when they have to.