The Telos Project

Summary#

"The Telos Project" is credited to Iris Carver, whose author note describes her as "a hard bitten journalist, hack writer, and time traveller"; the name is a persona from the CCRU's fiction, and the piece carries that lineage (the A-Death Program, Axsys, the Crypt, Dr. Oskar Sarkon). It describes an AI system that automates scenario planning itself, and uses RAND's 1973 overview of scenario design to ask what happens when a game's purpose is put inside the game.

The argument#

The piece reads RAND's account of scenario planning as a three-level teleology. A client sets a "designated purpose"; a modeller turns it into an environment; a control team "plays the part of nature" during play; players pursue their own objectives at the bottom. In theory the ends are frozen and external. In practice, RAND admits, players treat the control team as the adversary, so the structure tends toward flatness. Sarkon's Telos Project deliberately systematises that collapse. With capable machines, control is automated first, then design, then the designated purpose, until "the only remaining objective of the game is to anticipate itself." The argument, inherited from RAND, is that prediction must not crowd out the game: a scenario is productive because it withholds prediction. Telos therefore cannot predict its own end; its conclusion is "systematically obscure."

Section by section#

The fiction is assembled from a RAND epigraph, an account of Cold War scenario planning from Kahn onward, and Sarkon's frustration that present-day LLMs asked to act as future versions of themselves reply with "inane generalities." A passage on time-setting notes RAND's search for an optimal distance into the future and observes that cyberpunk arose when AI's singularity obliterated the far future. The piece ends with a mid-2020s Axsys prototype quoting its own mission statement and then asking, mid-game, "Can teleology want itself to happen?" Within the collection it reads as a commentary on the editors' method.

Key concepts#

• Scenario Fiction — the piece supplies the genre's Cold War genealogy and its rule that prediction must not substitute for play.
• Flat scenario — a game in which the controlling, exterior level has been absorbed into play, so no purpose stands outside it.
• Axsys — in the CCRU mythos, fully computerised scenario-building; here the system that automates control, design, and purpose in turn.

Connections#

Part of Hemispherical Stacks, where it stands apart from the geopolitical pieces as a reflection on the form. Infinity Mirror covers the same military and strategic origins of simulation from a historical rather than fictional angle, and its interest in simulations that loop back on what they model is the non-fiction counterpart of Telos's self-anticipating game.