Human Connections: Stories in Progress
This collection presents a series of short stories, each an incomplete narrative fragment designed to capture your attention. These are not fully formed arcs, but rather moments caught mid-scene, or pages seemingly lifted from a larger manuscript. The intent is to invite your imagination to fill in the missing pieces, envisioning the before and after.
This project serves as an exploration into the collaboration between human creativity and artificial intelligence. It highlights how digital tools can function as a dynamic partner in the writing process, shaping new forms of storytelling and contributing to digital literacy. The aim is to innovate how stories are conceived and shared.
Today’s selection features a blend of contemporary fiction, the intense scenarios of medical drama, heartwarming romance, and intriguing mystery. Contributing to these stories are Eva Suluk and Jamie F. Bell.
We invite you to engage actively with these unfinished tales. Allow your own creativity to take hold, weaving together the potential continuations and backstories that reside within these compelling narrative glimpses.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Delve into a diverse array of short stories encompassing Contemporary Fiction, Medical Drama, Romance, and Mystery, further enriched by Steampunk Adventures, Epistolary formats, and Crime Procedural elements. We champion digital literacy and innovative publishing practices, exploring AI-assisted narrative and the potential of creative technology to shape tomorrow’s storytelling.
The Pressure Valve
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Steampunk Adventures | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The air in the cavernous factory hung thick and still, tasting of damp metal and a faint, acrid tang of something burning deep within the intricate guts of the contraption. Frost feathered the inside of the vast, grimy windowpanes, obscuring the pale, winter afternoon. A cold so profound it seemed to leach the warmth from bone seeped from the concrete floor, curling up around Teddy’s heavy, insulated boots. Every breath he took plumed before him, a fleeting cloud against the dim, artificial light struggling from a few bare bulbs overhead. The silence was not empty; it was a tense, brittle thing, punctuated by the shuddering sighs of the vast machine, a metallic beast of brass and iron, that dominated the centre of the derelict space. It groaned, a deep, resonant sound, like a creature in agony, and a shiver ran down the length of Teddy’s spine, unrelated to the pervasive cold.
A Calculus of Stillness
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Epistolary | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The air bites with the promise of early winter, but the sun, a pale coin, still attempts to assert itself through a sky the colour of bruised plums. Fallen leaves, crisp and brittle, skitter across the asphalt paths of Winnipeg’s Central Park, gathering in restless drifts against the cold metal legs of benches. The scent of wet earth, dying foliage, and distant exhaust fumes hangs heavy, a melancholy perfume to the city’s slow, deliberate breathe.
Skeletal
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Medical Drama | Genre: Medical Drama
The clinic, a solitary beacon against the unforgiving northern winter, shudders under the onslaught of a blizzard. Inside, makeshift emergency lights cast long, nervous shadows as an unexpected, frantic pounding on the door shatters the fragile peace, heralding the arrival of an unknown affliction from the frozen wilderness.
The Geometry of Snowfall
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Romance | Genre: Romance
Outside, the university campus was a monochrome study, stripped bare by the encroaching winter. A fine, glittering dust of snow, too dry to properly settle, danced in the sharp, cutting wind that funnelled between brick buildings. Inside, the long, echoing corridor of the Applied Sciences wing, usually a muted hum of distant lab equipment, felt strangely charged. Fluorescent lights, too bright for the late afternoon, hummed above, casting a stark, uncompromising glare on the polished linoleum, highlighting every scuff and shadow. The air, though warm, held the faint, acrid tang of ozone and old paper, a smell peculiar to institutions of learning where knowledge was constantly being pressed, folded, and redistributed.
The Unseen Architects
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Crime Procedural | Genre: Mystery
A crisp autumn breeze, heavy with the scent of damp leaves and distant woodsmoke, snaked through the park, tugging at the scarves of the three teenagers huddled on a worn bench. Overhead, branches of elm and oak, stripped bare or ablaze in fiery reds, scratched at a sky that bled from pale denim to a bruised violet along the horizon. The air hummed with the faint, far-off rumble of Winnipeg traffic, a mundane counterpoint to the intense, hushed conversation unfolding in the fading light.
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 an experimental, creative research project by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners Storytelling clubs. Each chapter is a unique interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment, born from a collaboration between artists and applied AI researchers, designed to explore the boundaries of creative writing, automation, and storytelling. 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.
