Clivilius Secret Service (CSS)

Origin and Formation

By the morning of 29 April 2019, the Clivilius Lead Council had been meeting for over eight months and had begun, through deliberate design, to outgrow itself. The Lead Council had formalised its administrative Secretariat in late January and was running the daily operational reality of Bixbus through a structure of named departments. What it could not do — what no body convening weekly on a hill across the river had ever been built to do — was carry the long-range, sensitive, and inter-settlement work whose execution required both candid deliberation and the operational reach to act on the conclusions.

On the morning of 29 April 2019, eight founders convened to establish a body that would handle the strategic deliberation. In the same single act, on the same morning, they established a second body to handle its execution. The deliberative body was the Clivilius High Council. The operational body was the Clivilius Secret Service. From the moment of their founding, the two were understood as a complementary pair: the High Council deliberated; the Secret Service executed.

That framing — born of a single morning's decision — has remained the operational reality of both institutions ever since.

The Operational Mandate

The Clivilius Secret Service was given, from its founding, the responsibility of doing the work the High Council needed done. In practice, that responsibility sits along three intersecting axes.

The first is intelligence. The CSS gathers, processes, and analyses the operational intelligence on which the High Council's deliberations depend. Without it, the Conclaves would be making strategic decisions about a Clivilius they could not see clearly. The Intelligence Analysis Division of the CSS feeds the Council; the Council, in turn, sets the priorities the Division collects against.

The second is execution. When the High Council reaches a decision that requires action — the recovery of an artefact, the establishment of a presence in a new settlement, the neutralisation of a threat — it is the Secret Service that carries out the work. The Field Operations Division handles the on-the-ground activity, from surveillance to retrieval to direct intervention.

The third is protection. The Secret Service protects the physical security of the High Council's members, the integrity of the headquarters they share, and the secrecy of the deliberations on which both bodies depend. The Security and Enforcement Division of the CSS maintains the protocols, the access controls, and the operational discretion that make the High Council's work possible at all.

Across all three axes, the underlying principle has held since the founding morning: the Secret Service is not a separate intelligence agency operating in parallel with the High Council. It is the Council's other half.

Chief Operative: Marcus Alexander Lane

The position of Chief Operative has, since November 2023, been held by Marcus Alexander Lane.

Lane was born on 5 January 1990 in New Edinburgh, a Clivilius settlement founded by the Stewart sisters in 1762 — over two and a half centuries before Bixbus existed, and a body of Clivilius's settled history that the Lead Council, in 2018, was barely beginning to comprehend. His family was descended from the original alliance that had bound New Edinburgh to Chewbathia, the military hub the Stewart sisters established to provide for New Edinburgh's defence. Lane's father was a decorated officer in the Chewbathian Hunters, the desert-warfare and reconnaissance specialists who remain Chewbathia's most distinctive military formation. His mother was a historian of military strategy. He was, by upbringing, a child of one of Clivilius's older settled traditions.

After graduating from the University of New Edinburgh in 2012 with a degree in political science and international relations, Lane joined the Chewbathian military and served until April 2019. His most consequential operation during that period was Operation Desert Sentinel on 22 April 2015, which dismantled a Portal Pirate spy network operating from the desert margins of Chewbathian territory. The operation was conducted a week before the founding of the CSS, and its success placed Lane on the recruitment list of an institution that, at the time, did not yet exist.

He joined the CSS as a founding-cohort operative in May 2019, was promoted to Senior Operative on 1 March 2020 at the age of thirty, and was appointed Chief Operative on 1 November 2023. He commands from the Sentinel Room, on Level B6 of the Office of Strategic Intelligence, during operations of sufficient classification that they cannot be coordinated from any of the building's higher floors.

Lane's appointment as Chief Operative was, in retrospect, a significant moment for the institutional self-understanding of the CSS — not because of any particular decision he made in his first year in the role, but because of what his biography represented. In appointing as its operational head a man whose family lineage tied him to a Clivilius settlement two centuries older than Bixbus, the Service was making explicit an institutional truth that had been implicit since the founding: the Secret Service draws on the settled depth of Clivilius, not just the institutional ambitions of its newest capital.

The Six Divisions

The CSS is organised into six divisions, each occupying a distinct allocation of the Office of Strategic Intelligence and each charged with a distinct operational function.

The Strategic Operations Division sits at the centre of the divisional ecosystem, providing the coordinating function that synchronises the activities of the other five. Its personnel move between floors to ensure that intelligence, field operations, security, technical research, and cultural preservation work are aligned with one another and with the High Council's strategic direction.

The Field Operations Division occupies Levels 4 through 6 of the Office. Level 4 houses the Tactical Command Centre, with monitoring systems for tracking operatives across both worlds and encrypted communication nodes maintaining contact with active field assets. Level 5 contains the training, simulation, and operational armoury facilities. Level 6 provides real-time intelligence support for missions in progress.

The Intelligence Analysis Division occupies Levels 7 through 9. Level 7 handles data collection and initial processing, drawing in inputs from across both worlds and across Clivilius's expanding settlement network. Level 8 conducts the advanced analysis and intelligence synthesis, including the Pattern Recognition Suite that uses quantum computing to model probability cascades across Earth and Clivilius. Level 9 produces the strategic intelligence reports that go to the High Council — reports whose long-range framing distinguishes them from the more immediate threat assessments produced by the lower analytical floors.

The Security and Enforcement Division occupies Levels 10 through 12. The division handles the internal security of the Service itself, the enforcement of CSS protocols across personnel and facilities, and the physical protection of the High Council's members and the headquarters they share. Its work is the most directly visible to those who pass through the Office's secure perimeter, and the most invisible to those who pass through it without noticing.

The Technical and Research Division occupies the upper sub-basements: Levels B1, B2, and B3. Level B1 houses Technology Development and the workshops where field equipment is rapid-prototyped. Level B2 is the Innovation Hub, a research environment dedicated to longer-horizon technological work. Level B3 handles Strategic Research and Special Projects — the technical work whose nature remains classified even from most CSS personnel.

The Cultural and Historical Preservation Division is the divisional outlier. Where the other five divisions handle intelligence, security, technical, and operational work in recognisably traditional forms, the Cultural and Historical Preservation Division conducts archaeological retrieval missions, museum and historical-society liaison, and the preservation work that the Master of Cultural Affairs on the High Council orients toward strategic ends. The Division's most public output to date has been its work for the Museum of Old & New Earth in Bixbus, including the operations that secured several of the museum's signature Renaissance holdings.

The six divisions, in their founding form, were structured to grow. As the wider Clivilius opens up, as new strategic problems emerge, and as the High Council authorises new operational mandates, the divisional structure is designed to expand into them. The current six are the founding state, not the final state.

Headquarters: The Office of Strategic Intelligence

The Clivilius Office of Strategic Intelligence occupies the northwest corner of Unity Plaza in Bixbus. The building is a hundred-metre square with fifteen floors above ground and seven sub-basements, completed between October 2021 and 2022 within foundations laid during Unity Plaza's earlier construction phases. The construction was conducted with deliberate operational discretion: the sub-basements were excavated by rotating crews working in sealed sections, and the above-ground building was completed under similar protocols, with no single group of workers permitted to understand the complete layout.

The internal allocation of the Office reflects the institutional partnership at its centre. Levels 1 through 3 present the building's public-facing administrative facade — security checkpoints, lobby, café, meeting rooms, offices for staff whose ordinary functions can be openly described. Levels 4 through 12 house the operational divisions of the CSS in the order set out above. Levels 13 through 15 belong to the executive functions of both the CSS and the High Council, with the Council's Conclaves convened in the Office's most secure upper rooms and the CSS's strategic leadership working from the same upper floors. The War Room on Level 15 activates during crises. The sub-basements descend through increasing classification: B1 through B3 for the Technical and Research Division, B4 and B5 for secure archives, B6 for the Command and Control Centre and the Sentinel Room from which the Chief Operative commands.

The Office is connected to Unity Tower by covered walkways at Levels 3, 6, and 9. It is also adjacent to the Unity West and Unity North residential wings, where many CSS personnel live with their families. The architectural integration is deliberate: intelligence officers walk to work in metres rather than kilometres, their children attend the same schools as the families they protect, their commutes pass through the courtyards they are responsible for keeping safe. The arrangement humanises the work in ways that an isolated security compound could not, and complicates operational secrecy in ways that an isolated security compound would not have to manage.

The Portal Facility

Level B7, the deepest of the Office's sub-basements, houses the Portal Facility. The chamber contains the dimensional gateway technology that enables Guardian movement between Earth and Clivilius, and the supporting infrastructure for Portal Key authentication and maintenance. The CSS operates the facility; the Guardian Order, which long predates any institution in Bixbus, retains standing access to it.

The arrangement is the operational counterpart to the High Council's deliberative liaison with the Guardian Order. Where the Council's relationship to the Order is conducted through Luke Smith's role as Guardian Advisor, the Service's relationship to the Order is conducted through shared physical custody of the Portal Facility itself. The Order does not formally answer to the CSS in any matter touching the Portal — the Order's authority predates the Service by over four millennia — but the day-to-day operation of the facility, the maintenance of its security, and the monitoring of its transit logs are all CSS responsibilities.

The Department of Portal Sciences

The CSS administers the Department of Portal Sciences (DPS), established in late 2021 in response to a series of Portal-security breaches whose nature could not be addressed within the existing Technical and Research Division alone. The DPS was constituted as a specialised research and development branch focused on three intersecting concerns: the systematic study of Portal technology itself, including the Portal Key and the Majorana-particle physics on which it depends; the development of countermeasures against Portal Piracy, the practice by which unauthorised actors had begun finding ways to reset and clone Portal Keys originally bound to Guardian carriers; and the legal and ethical work of governing inter-world travel through frameworks that did not yet exist when the breaches began.

The Department operates from a secure wing of the Technical and Research Division on the Office's sub-basements, but its staff — handpicked technologists, engineers, physicists, and intelligence operatives — work under tighter compartmentalisation than the rest of the Division. Its collaborations with Clivilius National University are conducted through select faculties (Information Technology, Engineering, Physics, and Law and Governance) under classified arrangements that allow academic expertise to feed into the Department's work without academic publication exposing it.

The DPS's most consequential output to date has been the Key Safeguard System, a quantum-encryption protocol developed in early 2023 that binds Portal Keys to their Guardian carriers in ways that make resetting or cloning the keys virtually impossible without detection. Its rollout to active Guardians began in the year following its development, and it represented the first major technological response to the Portal Piracy problem since the breaches of 2020 and 2021 first revealed the scale of the threat.

The Department's classified status under the Service reflects the strategic importance of the work. Of all the technologies that bind Earth to Clivilius, the Portal Key is the single most consequential, and the DPS is the body charged with ensuring it remains under the control of those it was designed to serve.

Sister Body: The Clivilius High Council

The relationship between the Clivilius Secret Service and the Clivilius High Council was established at the founding and has held, in essential form, ever since. The two bodies were created in a single act on 29 April 2019. They are not parent and subordinate. They are sister institutions — the deliberative and the operational halves of a single response to a single strategic problem.

In practice, the relationship has been intimate. The CSS provides the High Council with the operational intelligence on which its deliberations depend, executes the field operations its decisions require, and protects the physical security of its members and headquarters. The High Council in turn provides the CSS with strategic direction, authorises its operational latitude, and shields it — as far as the Council's own secrecy is able — from the kind of public scrutiny that would compromise its work.

The seam between the two bodies is occupied by Nina Volkov, whose position as Strategic Intelligence Liaison on the High Council was created precisely to translate operational reality into strategic deliberation, and to carry the deliberations back into Field Operations as direction. The seam is also embodied, less formally, by the building the two bodies share. The Service's operational floors and the Council's executive ones sit within the same walls, accessed from the same lobby, served by the same secure infrastructure.

Inter-Settlement Reach

The Clivilius Secret Service is not a Bixbus body. Its founding was a Bixbus event, its headquarters is in Bixbus, and the bulk of its institutional support comes from the High Council whose own work is rooted in Bixbus governance. But the operational reach of the Service has, from its earliest years, extended well beyond the boundaries of any single settlement.

The clearest evidence is biographical. Marcus Alexander Lane came not from Bixbus but from New Edinburgh, the Stewart-founded settlement whose history predates the Lead Council by more than two centuries, and his operational training came from the Chewbathian Hunters of Chewbathia, the military hub whose desert-warfare specialisation has informed the Service's tactical posture in ways that a Bixbus-grown intelligence body would not have been positioned to absorb. The CSS maintains formal ties to the Chewbathian Military Establishment, and conducts joint operations with the Chewbathian Shadow Division on matters of mutual strategic interest.

The Service also maintains an operational presence in Lynwood Heights, a Clivilius settlement with which Bixbus established a formal trade agreement in which the CSS played an instrumental role. The arrangement gives the Service a foothold in a settlement whose interests do not always align with Bixbus's, and a working understanding of how cooperation between settlements with divergent histories can be conducted at the operational level rather than left to formal diplomatic channels.

Beyond these direct relationships, the CSS participates in the Portal Technology Security and Research Collaboration, a body whose membership extends beyond the boundaries of any single Clivilius institution and whose work touches on the Portal infrastructure the Service is responsible for protecting. The Collaboration's existence — and the Service's participation in it — is itself a marker of how the operational work of inter-world security has begun to require structures that no single body, in any single settlement, is yet equipped to handle alone.

The Pattern of Growth

The Clivilius Secret Service in its founding form was a body of six divisions, a small founding cohort of operatives, and a strategic mandate considerably larger than its initial capacity. In the years since, its divisions have grown, its operatives have multiplied, and its mandate has expanded into operational realities its founders could not have anticipated. The Department of Portal Sciences was established in late 2021. The Office of Strategic Intelligence was completed in 2022. The Chief Operative position was filled by Marcus Lane in late 2023. Each of these milestones was a moment of structural growth that the founding architecture had been designed to accommodate.

The Service was not built to be finished. It was built to be expanded — to add divisions when new operational mandates emerged, to authorise new specialised bodies when problems exceeded the existing divisional structure, to absorb operational responsibilities the High Council had not yet thought to delegate. As the wider Clivilius opens up, as the inter-settlement work scales, as the Portal infrastructure becomes more complex, and as the High Council's strategic ambitions become more genuinely commensurate with their stated reach, the operational arm of that ambition will scale with them.

The current Service is a snapshot. The institution it was built to become is still under construction.