Synopsis.
Name
The Shirky Principle. A body is founded to solve a problem, and does, and is funded and staffed and honoured for solving it ... and everything it is now depends on the problem going on, so it solves the problem just enough to keep the pressure off and never enough to end it, because the day the problem ends, so does the body.
Arc
The bend is this: the institution built to solve a problem comes to need the problem, so it preserves the thing it was made to remove. It runs on a split between the mission and the livelihood, which start as one and slowly part. At the founding they align: solve the problem, and the budget, the jobs, and the standing follow. But solving is not a state, it is a service, and the service is paid only while the problem lasts, so the fully solved problem is the institution's own end. And no one has to choose that end for it to be avoided: it is enough that every incentive points the other way, that a win shrinks the budget and a persisting problem renews it, that the people whose salaries depend on the problem sincerely cannot see the interest that depends on their not seeing it. So the body solves to the level that keeps it needed and no further: it relieves the symptom that would force a real fix, widens the problem's definition as the old version fades, finds new instances, keeps the threat warm. The mission is never dropped, only quietly displaced by the survival that now wears its clothes, and the problem it was built to end becomes the problem it is built to keep. Fund the outcome instead of the activity, and sunset the mandate on success, and the incentive flips: but that asks a body to be paid for making itself unnecessary, which is the one thing it is organised never to do.
Stakes
Whether the problem is ever solved, or only ever sustained. Every plot but the last moves the same way: not toward the end of the problem, toward the continuation of the body that answers it. The production cannot make an institution pay for its own obsolescence. It can only show that no one was cynical and no one schemed, that the mission was sincere and the work was real, and that the one outcome that would have vindicated the founding, the problem actually ended, is the one outcome every incentive the founding created is arranged to avoid.
Estate
khai-misfits: the house that holds this production and answers for the whole run.