The Unknown and the Everyday
What follows is a series of unfinished tales, moments frozen in time that lack a traditional conclusion. These excerpts focus on atmosphere and character voice rather than plot resolution. By removing the ending, the text remains fluid, allowing the reader’s imagination to populate the darkness and define the boundaries of the story’s world.
This work is an experimental program situated at the intersection of human creativity, interdisciplinary arts, and applied artificial intelligence research. It highlights how digital tools can act as a partner in the writing process. The project is dedicated to shaping new forms of storytelling and scriptwriting, providing a platform for enhancing digital literacy skills and workflows.
Spanning the gap between grounded Slice of Life and theoretical Hard Sci-Fi, this selection also incorporates Horror and Coming-of-Age themes. These works are brought to you by Jamie F. Bell. The stories oscillate between the comfort of the known world and the terrifying possibilities of the unknown.
We invite you to engage with these short stories as a creative partner. Read the available text and let your mind drift into the possibilities of what comes next, crafting your own resolution to the conflicts presented.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
With a focus on hard sci-fi, horror, and satirical commentary, this collection analyzes the nuances of coming-of-age narratives. Our goal is to shape the future of publishing by applying creative technology to the craft of writing short stories. Through the lens of digital literacy and AI-assisted narrative, we offer expository and psychological thrillers that challenge conventional storytelling methods within the realms of slice of life and Boys Love (BL).
Grin Beneath the Sycamore
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Horror | Genre: Horror
The spring air, thick with the scent of wet earth and early blossom, hung heavy and humid around the abandoned glasshouse. Rain, a soft drizzle all morning, had just lifted, leaving the world slick and glistening. New growth, an unruly emerald tide, pushed relentlessly through cracked concrete and ancient, buckling asphalt. The sycamore trees, still sparse with infant leaves, wept condensation onto the ground, their shadows stretching long and distorted in the weak, watery light filtering through the cloud cover. It was a place where beauty and decay wrestled in a slow, suffocating embrace, and today, the decay seemed to be winning.
Freeze of the Prairie Line
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Satirical / Ironic | Genre: Slice of Life
The air, sharp and unyielding, bit at Steve’s exposed knuckles. A grey smear of sky pressed down on the desolate expanse of the Manitoba prairie, where the only sign of life was the ’24-Hour Bite Stop’ — a solitary beacon of flickering neon and exhaust fumes. Inside, the diner trembled with the passing of another semi, its groan a familiar counterpoint to the impending, suffocating storm.
Anomalous Signatures in the Cultural Archive
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Expository | Genre: Hard Sci-Fi
The meeting space was not a room, but a shared processing instance within the ship’s core consciousness. To the human observer, Johnny, it manifested on his neural interface as a vast, minimalist sphere of soft white light. Three nodes of denser light pulsed rhythmically within the sphere—the presences of the Curator AIs: Martin-7, Tina-4, and Bethany-9. The only sound was the faint, subliminal hum of data being endlessly sorted, catalogued, and preserved.
Direction Measured in Poplar Bark
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Boys Love (BL) | Genre: Coming-of-Age
The compass was a joke. Noah knew it before they even left the trailhead. The cheap plastic housing and the bubbly, sluggish needle felt wrong in his palm. But Mr. Davies, the gym-teacher-turned-outdoorsman for the week, had clapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Same model the army uses, son!’ which Noah knew for a fact was a lie. Now, with the autumn sun bleeding out behind the dense wall of spruce and birch, the cheap plastic felt like a death sentence.
A Circuit of Thin Air
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Psychological Thriller | Genre: Sci-Fi
The control room hummed with a low, electrical thrum, a sound that always managed to settle deep in Lucie’s bones. Outside, a late autumn snow had begun to fall, muffling the city into a soft grey, but inside, the light was harsh and unforgiving, reflecting off polished chrome and the cool sheen of holographic displays. The air smelled faintly of ozone and stale coffee, a scent as familiar as her own breath after weeks spent within these four walls. Every flicker of the monitors felt like a personal challenge, every soft whir of the cooling fans a judgement.
About the Project
By design, these stories have no beginning and no end. Many stories are fictional, but many others are not. They are snapshots from worlds that never fully exist, inviting you to imagine what comes before and what happens next. We had fun exploring this project, and hope you will too.
The Unfinished Tales and Short Stories collection is part of an experimental, creative arts and research program by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners collectives. Each chapter is an interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment focused on two key areas: AI-Assisted Scriptwriting, where researchers explore using AI to generate story ideas, plot structures, and alternative story arcs to enhance creative development; and Talent Development and Training, where the project studies the necessary skills for creative professionals to manage AI and immersive technologies in production, helping to inform future training curricula. The project was made possible with funding and support from the Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program and the Government of Ontario. We thank them for supporting the arts, digital transformation research and innovation in Ontario.
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