4.4.25 - The Book Keepers Dilemma pt 1
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Parable 1: The Mattress That Held the World
The bedroom was dim, its light filtered through narrow blinds that fractured the morning into slender rays. The air was thick with the lingering scent of sleep and baby powder. At the center of the cramped room, a queen-sized mattress loomed like a ship's deck—ostensibly large enough for two adults, but entirely inadequate once small limbs came tumbling into it during the night. It had once been perfect, when it was only Father and Mother. Now it served as the chaotic heart of the household, a shared sanctuary and battlefield where elbows jabbed ribs and dreams got interrupted by tiny feet.
Father had found the mattress on sale, tucked between too-good-to-be-true listings on Amazon. Five-star reviews gleamed with praise: "This is the best matress I had ever." He never paused to question the typos or the fact that all the reviews were written in the same awkward syntax. Bots, surely. But a bargain was a bargain, and he had learned long ago not to look too closely at anything that might make him hesitate.
It wasn't just a mattress. It was the arena where lullabies were sung and nightmares defeated by parental arms. It was the platform where Saturday cartoons began, and the inevitable breakfast crumbs were crushed into the sheets. The mattress held arguments, reconciliations, tantrums, and laughter. It held a growing family. It remembered.
It remembered dreams that never ended. Conversations that never happened. There were nights when Father woke with a start, breath ragged, utterly convinced the mattress had shifted beneath him—expanded, curled, or recoiled in a way that made no logical sense. Sometimes, when the baby cried in the middle of the night, he could swear it wasn’t the baby’s voice at all—but his own, younger and more afraid, echoing across the threads of sleep. Other times, he swore the mattress sighed when he stood up too fast.
The room around it offered only the essentials: a box fan that groaned when it rotated, a tall mirror with a slight warp that made the viewer appear a little softer, a little sadder. The mirror, though not intended for vanity, had become a prop in Father's arsenal of household absurdities. Occasionally, he'd slip into one of his oversized shirts, push his hands through the collar, and make grotesque faces at himself in the glass.
"Behold," he'd say to the kids, voice low and theatrical, "a cursed nutsack with a face."
The children shrieked with delight. Mother shook her head and smiled, scrubbing dishes in the other room while Father performed his morning nonsense. Her smile always lingered just a moment longer than it should, like she was trying to freeze it into something useful.
Despite its size, the room brimmed with personality. Family photos covered the walls, each one a frozen burst of joy. There were snapshots from trips to France, Italy, and half a dozen corners of Florida. Between them hung paintings done by both Father and Mother—brushstrokes born not from ambition, but from a need to escape the relentless routine of parenting. They didn't paint to inspire the children. They painted to stay sane. One canvas was just swirls of brown and blue, titled in shaky handwriting: "The House With No Corners."
Another showed the mirror, but darker, without reflection. A third was an unfinished landscape, smeared gray, with one red tree in the corner and what looked like a hospital band around the base of the trunk. Neither of them remembered painting it—though, to be fair, the chaos of raising three children under seven had blurred many memories. It could’ve been a late-night project, one of those stolen hours after bedtime when silence felt like a reward. Still, something about it felt off, like the painting had arrived, rather than been made.
That morning, Mother had already been cleaning for hours. The youngest child's first birthday loomed just two days away, and the full weight of familial expectation pressed down on the small household. Relatives were coming—some who had never seen the house before, and others who had only heard stories. The home, while small, had to sparkle.
Laundry was folded and stacked. Dishes scrubbed until the metal shined. The floor, swept twice already, would still crunch beneath socks. As she stepped into the bedroom to tackle the bathroom next, Mother noticed a suspicious lump under the blanket. A faint bluish glow pulsed beneath it.
She didn't need to guess.
"Wake up, daydreamer! It's almost noon," she called out, swiping at the air like she was trying to shoo off a mosquito. "Don't you have a test today? I swear, I don't know how you can sleep through these kids screaming."
From beneath the blanket came a muffled groan. "I was awake," Father lied, voice hoarse. "Just... calibrating. I was about to help with lunch, knock out school, and then maybe get on the game."
"Oh my God—you were awake this whole time?" she snapped. "You couldn't help with the baby? I've been up since six!"
"I needed a few minutes to reset. Just a few," he said, knowing full well how flimsy that sounded.
"No games today. We have to clean. Tomorrow we shop. Saturday's the party. You don't get to float through it."
He rolled onto his back and sighed like a man sentenced. "Fine. But I'm picking the baby's party hats."
"Deal," she said, already halfway out the door. "But you're cleaning the bathroom."
"Fair enough."
Their house was nestled in a retirement community on the edge of greater Orlando, a forgotten loop of aging double-wides and receding grass. The neighborhood had been built for a different generation—one that valued silence, circular saws at dawn, and the ritual of complaining about HOA fees. Most residents kept gardens or pets or some other small project that kept their minds moving just fast enough to ward off decay.
The house had come to them through a chain of casual acquaintances. A friend of a friend's uncle had needed tenants, and the landlord—blessedly indifferent—was the type to fix only what was broken and never ask questions. Father considered that a luxury.
The Orlando housing market had become an absurdity, with rents soaring and condos devouring any stretch of land that dared to stay green. Everywhere else, the world was expanding. Here, it stood still. Father, ever suspicious, had chosen to remain a renter. Not just out of practicality—he lacked a job that offered any reliable income—but because ownership felt like a trap. A cage with a deed.
The GI Bill, generous in theory, barely kept them afloat. It covered tuition, rent, and not much else. Father's schooling was paid for by ghosts—his years in uniform had earned him that much—but every day spent studying felt like a ticking clock. Once school was done, so was the stipend.
Mother, more pragmatic than Father, had done what he wouldn't: she asked for help. Applied for government assistance. Navigated the paperwork labyrinth to secure WIC and EBT so their children could eat something other than hope and peanut butter.
Father never blamed her—what was there to blame? She had done what he hadn’t been able to. Still, he couldn't follow her lead. Pride held him back, or maybe fear. To admit she’d been right was to admit he’d waited too long to act, to accept help, to change. He clung to the idea that he had paid his dues. That he was cashing in, not taking handouts.
But when he was honest with himself—and only ever while alone—he wondered if the whole system had already tagged him as redundant. Someone marked for obsolescence. A temporary placeholder in a story written for someone better.
Father told people he wanted to be a data scientist. He imagined a future where his children visited him at work, where he stood in front of a dry-erase board in a glass-walled office and explained machine learning to bright-eyed middle-schoolers on Take Your Kid to Work Day. He told himself this too.
But deep down, he wanted something simpler. Or maybe something grander. He wanted a life where choices didn't carry such weight. Where he didn't have to decide between ramen for a week or a single afternoon at Disney. He painted in secret, imagining his brushstrokes might someday sell. He wrote stories, though no one read them. Every rejection sank deeper than the last.
Still, he painted—because it made Mother happy.
Still, he wrote—because the curse of the gifted was a mind that never shut up.
Sometimes, in the middle of a painting, he would lose whole hours. The brush would move without thinking. Once, he found a note in his own handwriting beside the easel: "Do not paint the door."
He didn't remember writing it. It could have been a side effect of the Vyp0r—he had been taking more than usual lately, trying to balance schoolwork, parenting, and sleep. He told himself the dosage was still within reason, that forgetting things was just part of the daily blur. But something in the handwriting felt too clean. Too certain.
Sometimes the baby pointed to the painting and said "No door" before toddling off to hide under the kitchen table.
The door in question, as far as he could tell, didn’t exist.
He shuffled into the kitchen, still bleary, and fired up the Keurig his mother had given him on his thirtieth birthday. He scooped in brown sugar, poured half a glass of espresso, and drowned it in French vanilla creamer.
Usually, it was a hot drink.
Today, he poured it over ice.
A small change. But a change all the same.
"Should I even bother making coffee this late?" he mumbled.
Mother, scrubbing a pot with vinegar and resentment, didn't look up. "If you're still sleepy, make it. But help me clean."
"I was gonna make lunch too."
"Then drink your coffee and have breakfast for lunch."
"You know I hate breakfast."
"Then hate it while you clean."
From the other room came the baby's sing-song babble: "Pa da da pa pa da dolidolidolido!"
Father smiled and turned, hoisting his over-sweetened iced coffee like a trophy. The plastic tumbler was sweating in his hand, its lid barely sealed, sloshing with a concoction more milk than espresso.
"Good morning, mi bebe," he said warmly, voice still wrapped in sleep. "Your siblings are at school already. Maybe you can help me pick them up later."
He took a slow sip. The ice clinked against the sides, sharp and bright, as the cold bit down into his teeth and startled something briefly awake inside him.
The day had barely begun, but already, he felt behind.
Behind what, he couldn’t say.
The Book Keeper’s Dilemma – Table of Contents
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So for a backstory on what this one is. I had 2 chapters written out and it became the first 4 parables for this and the remaining 16 are all from chat gpt. I had vague summaries but its all chatgpt essentially. I want to do a comparison between light polishing with an establish story vs essentially using chatgpt to create the whole book. So the book keepers dilemma is going to be 100% from chat GPT. I am targeting a range of about 40k its currently at like 15k. I am slowly helping it along and I am going to act as an guide for chatgpt for continuity and things that just spoils the story. Its actually very hard to use chatgpt. there has been so many errors and faults and compression issues. It gets lazy just like me, maybe chatgpt is more human than we give it credit for. It does this thing where it starts off strong and then just tapers once it thinks its close to the given prompt restrictions over a solid cohesive plot line. I am assuming this is only going to get better and its good to understand a tool like this and its limitations and future iterations of the tech so we can plan accordingly on whats worth pursuing and whats worth waiting a few years to do.
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Okay I updated the prompt and got it to expand. I am now going line by line and ensuring continuity and story structure. I am only prompting it to be more descriptive or to explain its logic and asking it to change it if it feels like it would more sense another way.