Clivilius Lead Council (CLC)

Origin and Formation

The settlement that would eventually call itself Bixbus had existed for only a few weeks when the need for formal coordination became inescapable. Located on the near bank of a wide river in one small stretch of Clivilius, Bixbus had begun as a handful of tents and a Portal, and by early August 2018 it was growing faster than the informal arrangements that had carried it through its first weeks could sustain.

New arrivals were coming through the Portal at a rate that outstripped the capacity of any single individual to manage, and the work of keeping the settlement alive had become too complex for unwritten agreement to bear alone. A council was needed. Paul Smith, acting in the role of Lead Strategic Operations Coordinator, set about convening one.

The founding members were initiated on 13 August 2018, and the first meeting was held on the following morning.

The Name

The body was called, from its founding, the Clivilius Lead Council.

The decision was not the product of any great deliberation. It was simply the name Paul Smith used when he invited the founding members, and the name none of them objected to when they arrived. In the weeks before the first meeting, the newcomers at Bixbus had begun to suspect — through a handful of early encounters with outsiders from beyond their immediate region — that Clivilius was considerably older and considerably vaster than their tents and their river had prepared them to imagine. They understood this in theory. They had not yet had the kind of direct experience that would force them to understand it in practice.

And so the name that Paul used — and that none of the others objected to — claimed authority over the whole of Clivilius from a hill that had, until a few days earlier, held nothing on it but dust, rocks, and a newly planted oak sapling. In the moment of founding, the name carried no particular weight of irony. It was, to the six who sat around the sapling that morning, the obvious name for the body they were forming to govern the place they happened to be. That the place they happened to be was one small settlement in one small region of a Clivilius whose full reach they had not yet begun to grasp was, at that early hour, not the kind of observation anyone on the hill was in a position to make.

In the years that followed, as the settlement's contact with the wider Clivilius deepened, the scale of the claim embedded in the Council's name would become a source of quiet amusement, then a source of operational awkwardness, and finally a problem the settlement would have to solve by other institutional means.

The First Meeting

The first meeting of the Clivilius Lead Council was convened on the morning of 14 August 2018 on a hill across the river from Bixbus. The hill had been identified by Paul Smith a few days earlier as a suitable site for the Council's gatherings, and an oak sapling — brought through the Portal in one of Luke Smith's consignments for the settlement's fledgling plant nursery — had been planted there to mark the site.

There were no buildings on the hill. There was no furniture, no provision for water or shade, and no formal arrangement of any kind. The six members paddled themselves across the river in small kayaks to reach it, and the meeting proceeded in a loose circle around the sapling.

Paul convened the sitting without ceremony. The items discussed were the items the settlement could least afford to ignore: electricity generation, the sanitation of water supplies, the earliest work of flora and fauna introduction, the shortage of medical provision, the primitive state of existing construction, the need for roads and bridges, and — beneath all of these — the shortage of skilled personnel and general labour that constrained every other plan.

Decisions made at the meeting included the establishment of a Tent Community to accommodate further arrivals, the prioritisation of a Solar Power Plant and a Water Treatment Facility, the zoning of a Medical Facility, and the assignment of Adrian Pafistis to work with each Council member on the detailed specifications and resource requirements of every subsequent build. The minutes of the first meeting were recorded by Paul in a notebook he had carried up the hill folded inside his shirt, and remain the founding document of the Council's written record.

Founding Members

The six members who attended the first sitting were Paul Smith as Lead Strategic Operations Coordinator, Adrian Pafistis as Construction Engineer, Terry Saba as Principal Engineer for Renewable Power, Glenda De Bruyn as General Medical Advisor, Grant Ironbach as Director of the Wildlife Sanctuary Program, and Michael Abela as Manager of Water Treatment and Dams.

A seventh founding member, Luke Smith — Paul's brother, and the Guardian Liaison to Earth — was recorded as a member of the Council but was absent from the inaugural sitting. His responsibilities on Earth made regular attendance impractical from the outset, and he would be named in the decisions of the first meeting without being present to hear them.

Meeting Cadence and Location

From its founding, the Council met weekly. The early culture of Bixbus did not adhere strictly to set times, and the hour of commencement varied in the Council's earliest weeks according to the availability of its members, but the seven-day rhythm of sittings was established at the close of the first meeting and held consistently through the months that followed.

All meetings in the Council's first year were held on the same hill across the river, in the same loose circle around the same oak sapling, under conditions that improved only gradually as successive members brought their own small provisions to the site. Minutes were kept from the first meeting onwards — initially by Paul Smith in his personal notebook, and subsequently in parallel by Glenda De Bruyn, who maintained her own written record from the inaugural sitting. Her notebook formed the basis of the Council's formal archival practice in the years that followed.

Membership Changes Through 2018

The Council's founding membership remained broadly stable through the remainder of August, September, and the first half of October 2018, addressing the iterative work of turning the first meeting's decisions into operational reality.

Changes began in the second half of October. Adrian Pafistis stepped down from the Council on 23 October 2018, having decided to focus his efforts on the hands-on construction work he had always favoured over formal governance. He continued to provide informal advisory support to the Council's design committee in the months that followed.

Dani Alexandra Nowaski joined on 30 October 2018 as Executive Urban Designer, bringing formal planning expertise to the increasingly complex question of how Bixbus would physically develop. Denton Samuel Watson was initiated on 5 November 2018 as Chief Transportation Engineer. Akshita Priya Klima joined on 21 November 2018 as Chief Advisor for Renewable Energy, succeeding Terry Saba, whose tenure on the Council ended on the same day.

On 26 December 2018, Glenda De Bruyn stepped down from her position as General Medical Advisor and was succeeded by her husband Pierre De Bruyn as Senior Medical Advisor.

By the close of 2018, the Council had grown beyond its original six and was meeting in a form more recognisable as a functioning department structure — though it still convened on the same hill, and still had no permanent building to meet within.

Formalisation (29 January 2019)

On 29 January 2019, at the Council's twenty-fifth meeting, the administrative structure was formally enacted. The meeting marked the transition of the Clivilius Lead Council from an ad hoc convenience into a permanent body of named departments with defined mandates. The formalised Secretariat established on that day comprised sixteen positions covering the full range of the governance responsibilities the Council had, by that point, accumulated.

Each Secretary was responsible for policy development, implementation, and reporting within their assigned domain. The formalisation did not replace the Council's existing working culture so much as give it a permanent shape — decisions continued to be made through discussion and mutual accountability, but from this point forward they were made within a structure of named departments with defined authorities.

The Formalised Secretariat

The sixteen inaugural positions of the Secretariat, established on 29 January 2019, were as follows:

• Secretary of Agriculture — Thomas Benjamin Harper
• Secretary of Antiquities — Nathaniel Alexander Grant
• Secretary of Commerce — Victoria Helene Crawford
• Secretary of Community Engagement — Sarah Louise Patel
• Secretary of Cultural Affairs — Carmella Rosetta Rossi
• Secretary of Defence — Jonathan Christopher Manning
• Secretary of Education — Rebecca Anne Williams
• Secretary of Energy and Water — Akshita Priya Klima
• Secretary of Environmental Protection — Lucia Gabriela Hernandez
• Secretary of Health and Human Services — Deborah Ann Snow
• Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — Dani Alexandra Nowaski
• Secretary of the Interior — Emily Marie Thompson
• Secretary of Justice — Katherine Evelyn Lockwood
• Secretary of Technology and Innovation — Markus Aaron Feldman
• Secretary of Transportation and Infrastructure — Denton Samuel Watson
• Director of Strategic Intelligence — Eddie Jonathan Hobson

Early Governance

From its earliest meetings, the Council operated as the principal civil authority of Bixbus — which, in the Council's own framing, was understood to stand in for the civil authority of Clivilius as a whole, even though the Council's actual operational footprint remained confined to the settlement on the near bank of the river and the handful of locations that could be reached from it on foot or by kayak.

The Council worked in close coordination with the Bixbus Administrative Office and was instrumental in drafting the Bixbus Compendium Charter, the foundational civic and ethical framework of the settlement. Glenda De Bruyn led the initial drafting of the Charter's medical and ethical provisions during her tenure as Medical Advisor, and the document was ratified as a working civic framework in the months following her departure.

The Council mediated the settlement's early land claims, oversaw the formation of its first civic services, managed the coordination of resource allocation between departments, and — as contact with settlements elsewhere in Clivilius began to multiply — handled the negotiations with those settlements on behalf of Bixbus. Much of the settlement's skilled-labour recruitment was coordinated through Luke Smith's Earth-side operations, with department leads supplying the specifications of the personnel required and Luke arranging for their recruitment and transfer through the Portal.

The Council Headquarters

The hill across the river from Bixbus on which the first meeting was held was formally zoned, from the Council's founding, as the Clivilius Headquarters. Throughout the Council's first year, the site was developed only gradually and only informally, with successive additions brought by individual members as they recognised the need for them — a practice that began at the first meeting, when Michael Abela arrived with a sheet of paper weighted at its four corners by stones he had gathered on the walk up the hill, and which continued in small increments from one weekly sitting to the next.

The hill itself, zoned from the Council's founding as the Clivilius Headquarters, was understood from the beginning as the intended site of a permanent seat of governance to come. In the Council's early years, that intent was held only by the zoning, by the sapling, and by the people who climbed the hill every week to sit around it.

Institutional Divergence

As Bixbus grew, and as the settlement's contact with the wider Clivilius deepened into something that a weekly sitting on a hill could not reasonably carry alone, new institutions were established around the Council — not to replace it, but to take up specific responsibilities that the Council's name had always claimed and that it had, at the beginning, been in no position to deliver on.

On 29 April 2019, three months after the Council's Secretariat had been formalised, two new bodies were convened in a single day.

The Clivilius High Council was established as a strategic layer above the CLC's administrative work — concerned not with the day-to-day business of departments but with long-range strategy, inter-settlement relations, and the kinds of decisions whose candour required that they be made out of the public eye. Paul Smith moved from his role as Lead Strategic Operations Coordinator into the position of High Council Overseer, and Luke Smith's Guardian liaison function was formalised under the title Guardian Advisor. The High Council was, from the outset, a deliberately secretive body: the identities of many of its members were protected, its decisions were often communicated through intermediaries, and its sittings — referred to as Conclaves — were held every thirty days rather than weekly.

On the same day, the Clivilius Secret Service was established as the intelligence and security arm of Bixbus's growing institutional architecture. The Service gave formal shape to the intelligence and security functions that the CLC had, in its earliest years, handled through informal means, and would later be headquartered in the Clivilius Office of Strategic Intelligence — though the building in question had not yet been constructed at the time of the Service's founding.

The last of the major successor bodies, the Bixbus Lead Council, was established later — once Bixbus had grown from a young settlement into a thriving regional centre whose local governance was outstripping the capacity of a council that had always, in principle, been responsible for a great deal more than a single town.

The creation of the BLC was the move that allowed the Clivilius Lead Council to finally direct its attention outward. With Bixbus's day-to-day administration passing into the hands of a dedicated local council, the CLC was — for the first time since its founding — free to turn toward the wider-Clivilius responsibilities its name had implied from the very first sitting. The naming ambition that the six founding members had carried up a hill in August 2018, without fully grasping what they were claiming, was not quietly walked back. It was, in the end, grown into.

Each of these bodies traces its institutional lineage back to the Clivilius Lead Council, and together they form the tiered governance structure through which Bixbus's administrative, strategic, and security responsibilities are now carried out.