parable

name	parable
description	Transform a question into a short parable that embodies it without stating it — a minimal world with one strange rule that makes the question's tension physical, inhabitants who live out the possible answers, and an ending that refuses to adjudicate. Use when a question would illuminate more as story than as analysis, in the tradition of LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
compatibility	Created for Zo Computer
metadata	{"author":"rob.zo.computer"}

Parable

Use this skill to compile a question into a story. The model is LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas": "can happiness justified by suffering be accepted?" is never asked in the text — it is built into the world as one concrete asymmetry (the child in the basement), the reader is enrolled in it, and the ending walks away rather than answers. The question precipitates in the reader precisely because the text won't hold it.

Purpose

Analysis answers questions; parable makes them inescapable. A good parable removes the abstraction and leaves only the mechanism, so the reader collides with the question as an experience rather than an argument. The output is a story, never an explanation of the story.

Procedure

1. Distill the question to its irreducible tension. One trade, one asymmetry, one impossible choice. If the question has three tensions, pick the deepest; a parable carries exactly one.
2. Build a minimal world with one strange rule that makes the tension physical. The rule does the work the question's abstraction was doing. (Omelas: the city's joy depends, by unexplained necessity, on the child's misery.) Keep the world small — a city, a house, a road, a season.
3. Cast the stances as inhabitants. Each plausible answer to the question becomes a way of living in the world: those who accept, those who rationalize, those who refuse, those who leave. Endorse none of them. Render each with enough dignity that a reader could defend it.
4. Implicate the reader. At least one move that breaks the fourth wall's safety: a frame-break ("Do you believe it?"), second person, or an offered choice the reader must silently make to keep reading.
5. End on an open image. A departure, a threshold, an unanswered gesture. The destination should be, as LeGuin has it, "less imaginable than the city of happiness." Never adjudicate, never summarize.

Length discipline

Target 300–800 words. (Omelas is ~2,800; you are writing a miniature, not a short story.) Every sentence either builds the world, embodies a stance, or turns the screw.

Output format

The parable itself — a title and the story. Nothing else. No preamble, no epigraph naming the theme, no afterword.

Guardrails

• No morals. No "the point is", no closing lesson, no thesis sentence hiding in the final paragraph.
• No 1:1 decodable allegory. If each element maps neatly to one referent, it's a cipher, not a parable. The story must over-generate meaning.
• The over-generation test: could a thoughtful reader extract a different question than the input and still be right? If not, the parable is too on-the-nose — rebuild.
• Stances get dignity. If one inhabitant is obviously the fool, you've answered the question and broken the machine.
• The strange rule stays unexplained. Explaining the mechanism converts myth into science fiction and invites engineering critiques instead of moral ones.

Composition

Pairs naturally with question-forge: forge the question first, then compile the forged question into a parable. A compound skill can run both and show the reader only the story.

Canonical questions

• Can happiness that depends on another's suffering be accepted? (→ Omelas itself)
• Is it wrong to love the thing that is destroying you?
• Should we build what people want, or what is good for them?
• What do we owe the people we've outgrown?
• Is a comfortable lie better than an unlivable truth?

Poor fits: operational or factual questions, questions with a correct answer (a parable about "should we use Postgres" is a bit), and audiences who asked for analysis and would experience a story as evasion.