The BFAP Motorhome Agreement

The meeting in Paul Smith's motorhome on the afternoon of 22 August 2018 is the moment at which the Bixbus Founding Architecture Project effectively came into being, notwithstanding the Clivilius Lead Council's formal ratification of the body at its third sitting six days later. The four people present were Paul Smith, Adrian Pafistis, Leila Grantley, and Eli Smith. The motorhome, parked at the edge of the early Bixbus encampment, was the only space in the settlement private enough to contain the conversation.

Leila and Eli had come directly from San Francisco, where they had that morning finalised an unprecedented partnership with Killerton Enterprises on behalf of the Guardians of Bixbus. Leila, who had become the fifth Guardian only the day before, had signed the agreement as its closer; Eli, the fourth Guardian, had signed alongside her to weight the Guardian Order's institutional commitment behind it. The deal would, in time, underwrite the next several years of the settlement's construction work. On the afternoon of 22 August, it was still only a set of papers in a leather folder, and an operational problem in need of an answer.

The answer proposed in the motorhome was a new body, to be established under the Council's authority, whose function would be to receive the flow of Killerton materials and personnel and deploy them into the construction priorities the Council had already set. Paul accepted the proposal in the understanding that the Council would ratify it at its next meeting without serious objection. He was in no condition that day to deliberate further. His daughter had died the previous afternoon, and the hours between her death and the meeting in the motorhome were hours he had spent largely in silence.

Adrian, already a member of the Council as Construction Engineer and by several measures the only person in Bixbus with the professional background to lead such a body, was named its founder and its Chief Construction Coordinator in the same conversation. He asked one question about the manner in which the Killerton workers were being recruited on the Earth side. He received an answer that was accurate in what it said and incomplete in what it did not, and he did not press the point. Every person in the motorhome that afternoon had arrived in Bixbus by a route they had not consented to in advance, and the shape of what Killerton was proposing was not, in that sense, unfamiliar.

The body was given its name in the same conversation. The phrase was settled upon by Paul as the discussion moved toward its close. The Bixbus Founding Architecture Project would be formally created at CLC Meeting 3 on 28 August 2018. Its actual creation had already occurred.