Bixbus Tent Community

Before the Rows

For its first weeks, Bixbus slept wherever it could. The settlers who came through in July and early August 2018 lived in a hodgepodge of camping tents, motorhomes, tarpaulins strung between pallets, and whatever else the Guardians had carried through from Earth. There was no plan to it and no room for one. The settlement was small enough that it did not yet need one.

That changed as the numbers grew. By the middle of August it was clear to the settlement's leadership that Bixbus could not go on housing each new arrival in whatever happened to be at hand, and that if more people were coming, as they plainly were, the settlement needed shelter in bulk. The answer was a raid.

The First Raid

In the early hours of 18 August 2018, Eli Smith and Brett Wilson broke into a military supply warehouse on Earth and loaded its contents through the portal Eli held open: enough military-grade tents to house at least 250 people, along with the equipment needed to put them up and keep them standing. At 2.55 that morning Brett drove a fully loaded military truck through after them and entered Bixbus for the first time, knowing that he would not be able to go back.

The Bixbus Tent Community dates from that day. Aaron Smyth, a former army logistics officer from Hobart who was already in Bixbus, took charge of the tents as soon as they arrived, and Brett joined him in running it from the moment he came through. Between them they held full authority over the camp from its first day, and they kept it for the rest of its existence.

The first tents went up that day, and the first settlers slept in them that night. By 21 August the first rows were standing. Fewer than a hundred settlers lived in Bixbus at the time, and most of them moved under canvas within days. Aaron laid the camp out in zones, separating sleeping tents from communal spaces, with a central supply area for food and tools and a basic arrangement of latrines and wash areas. It was rudimentary, but it was the first part of Bixbus that had been planned rather than improvised.

The Killerton Crews

The camp held its shape for about two months. From the start of October 2018, Killerton Enterprises began sending its construction crews through to build The Arlington, and within a fortnight more than three hundred workers had arrived. A camp of around 350 people nearly doubled almost overnight, and more were on the way.

Every one of them needed a tent. Ration lines lengthened, disputes broke out over space and supplies, and sanitation became a real danger. Early settlers resented the newcomers, who seemed to them to be treated better, and the newcomers resented a camp that was not what they had been led to expect. Many of them had only learned on their first day that they could not go home.

On 15 October Bixbus brought in Dominic Hayes, a British humanitarian logistics coordinator with long experience of refugee camps, to help Aaron and Brett restore order. Together they rezoned the camp to separate the construction crews from the early settlers, overhauled sanitation, rationed food by need rather than by order of arrival, and gave residents a way to raise grievances without them turning into fights. By the end of October the camp had steadied.

Aldo Heikki was among the Killerton men living in its rows that autumn. His wife, Leena, joined him on 13 November 2018, sent there by a ledger clerk on the afternoon she arrived, and found his tent empty because he was on shift. Boyd Drake arrived in February 2019 and moved into a tent of his own on 2 February.

Life Under Canvas

As the camp grew it was divided into numbered sectors, and a resident's sector and row became the nearest thing most of them had to an address. Arrivals were assigned a tent, or a share of one, when they were registered. Families were kept together where space allowed and often were not. Single workers were packed four or more to a tent.

Life there was crowded, dusty, and loud, and it was never comfortable. Water came from the river and had to be filtered. Power was scarce. Privacy was almost impossible. The camp was also, for many of its residents, the only community they had in Clivilius, and the friendships, rivalries, and habits formed in its rows outlasted it by years. Children grew up in it. Aukusti Heikki was born to two of its residents in April 2020, and spent his first year being walked between its rows at night.

Waves

The Tent Community never stopped filling. As Bixbus began exploring and mapping the land around it, it found other settlements that had failed months or years earlier after their Guardians disappeared, and the survivors were brought in. On 5 March 2019 nearly six hundred people arrived in a single day, and Aaron and Dominic pushed the camp's borders outward overnight to take them. The pattern repeated itself for years. Each new phase of the city's expansion and discovery brought another wave of people with nowhere else to go, and each one ended up in the rows.

Arrivals through the portals kept coming at the same time. By 2020 they surfaced at the Eastgate after processing in the Undercroft, and the families waiting to meet them often lived in the camp. On 5 February 2020 Boyd Drake met his children, Jenna and Ethan, there and took them back to his tent, where all three of them lived for the next two years. By 2021 the Tent Community housed thousands of people and had become one of the largest temporary settlements anywhere in Clivilius.

Emptying the Rows

The Bixbus Housing Authority was founded in June 2019 to get people out of tents and into homes. It allocated apartments in The Arlington and The Alexus as they were completed and worked alongside the camp's leadership to decide who went first. Progress was slow, and for every family it moved out, the next wave often brought several more in.

The balance shifted only as the city's building programme caught up. Boyd Drake moved into a Housing Authority apartment in 2022. The Heikkis left for an apartment in 2023, one of thousands of households to leave the camp that year as new developments opened across Bixbus. By the end of 2024 only a few hundred people remained, most of them in semi-permanent structures on its last sectors.

On 17 March 2025 the final residents were relocated, nearly seven years after the first tents went up. The ground they had stood on was given over to new residential developments. For the people who had lived there, the Tent Community remained the place where their life in Bixbus had begun, whether they remembered it fondly or not.