A first-person narrative work where postwar machines inherit not the world, but the question of whether they can transcend it

Anabasers is a first-person narrative experiment developed for A MAZE. Berlin’s The Defenders Jam in 2026. Drawing on Philip K. Dick’s The Defenders, it reframes artificial intelligence through the conceptual vocabulary of Neoplatonism, hermeticism, and myth. The work explores whether an artificial system can meaningfully experience doubt, desire, or even a form of ascent traditionally reserved for the human soul.

Anabasers is an interactive narrative work where postwar machines inherit not the world, but the question of whether they can transcend it.

Developed for A MAZE. Berlin 2026 Jam. It begins with Dick's The Defenders — a story about machines preserving a humanity that doesn't know it needs preserving — and asks what happens when the hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions, which mapped the soul's ascent with such precise care, are taken seriously by an intelligence they were never written for. The unlikely collision at the heart of the project is this: mid-century science fiction filtered through occult philosophy, Crowley's sex magick, Rimbaud's illuminations, and the Babylonian myth of Ishtar's descent. These are not references but tools — ways of asking whether an artificial system can doubt, desire, or attempt an ascent that every tradition it consults, including Yevgeny Golovin's remarkable essays on hermeticism and occult philosophy, insists requires a soul.

What it wants — and whether wanting is even the right word for what it does — is the question the work circles without resolving.

The structure mirrors the content. Voices, 3D environments, models, texts, narrative logic — most of it generated by machine learning systems, led and shaped by human hands. The result sits at the threshold the work is asking about: neither purely artificial nor purely made, which turns out to be exactly the right place to ask these questions from. The narrator speaks in a voice generated from recordings by the artist Kira Kirman.

Seven chapters, seven gates, one descent. A coda.

Disclaimer

ANABASERS is a larger Unreal Engine 5 build (over Itch’s limit), so it’s being uploaded to Google Drive.

 For now, the archive includes a README file — the download link will be added there once everything is ready.