Unfolding Worlds, Unseen Endings
Presented within this collection are a series of unfinished tales, each offering a brief, potent glimpse into a narrative journey. These stories exist as moments captured mid-scene, prompting the reader to fill in the unseen past and the unwritten future. It’s an invitation to become an active participant in the story’s completion.
This project is designed as an experiment at the crossroads of human creativity and artificial intelligence. It seeks to understand how digital tools can serve as a partner in the writing process, fostering new forms of storytelling and contributing to improved digital literacy. The focus is on expanding creative boundaries.
Today’s selection covers the spectrum from the everyday experiences of Contemporary Fiction to the emotional depths of Romance, the futuristic visions of Sci-Fi, the developmental arcs of Coming-of-Age, and the unsettling suspense of Horror. These diverse tales include contributions from Jamie F. Bell and The System.
We extend an invitation to explore these captivating unfinished tales. Allow your mind to wander through their possibilities, completing each narrative in a way that is uniquely personal and imaginative.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Engage with Contemporary Fiction, captivating Romance, imaginative Sci-Fi, poignant Coming-of-Age stories, and thrilling Horror, exploring themes like Western Style BL, Gritty Realism, Comedy, Epistolary formats, and Legal Thrillers. Our commitment to digital literacy delivers fresh short stories and redefines publishing. We harness creative technology to explore AI-assisted narrative, charting the course for the future of digital literary creation.
A Liturgy for Small Corrosions
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Western Style BL | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The Tuesday morning air in the kitchen was thick with the smell of damp tea towels and Finn’s burnt toast. Rain slicked the windowpane, blurring the grey stone of the tenement across the lane. Liam, needing coffee with a desperation that felt primal, found his path to the kettle blocked by his flatmate, who was standing guard over the cutlery drawer with the solemnity of a tomb sentinel.
A Bloom in the Grey
Category: Gritty Realism | Genre: Romance
The morning air, thick with the damp scent of thawing earth and distant exhaust fumes, clung to the skeletal branches of the city park’s elder trees. Patches of tenacious snow, grey at the edges, still stubbornly held on in the shadows beneath crumbling stone benches. But amidst the lingering chill, something impossible was pushing through the grime, a splash of colour too bold for the season, too perfect for this neglected urban corner. Cassy, gloved hands already coated in fine soil, felt a familiar pull of curiosity, a rare warmth stirring in her chest against the crisp morning.
The Sterile Bloom
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Comedy | Genre: Sci-Fi
The pavement in front of the Exchange District’s oldest bank building still bled melting snow, grey rivulets snaking towards overwhelmed drains. It was a Saturday morning, but the usual early buzz of delivery trucks and coffee-scented activity was replaced by a rigid cordon of police tape and the brittle crackle of walkie-talkies. Something impossible had happened here, something that Anette, seventy-two and having seen too much, found herself staring at with a familiar, weary disbelief that went beyond mere crime scenes.
My First Melgund Winter
Author: The System | Category: Epistolary | Genre: Coming-of-Age
The first cold snap in Melgund Township had arrived, a sharp, exhilarating declaration of winter. Inside the community hub, where the old library once stood, the digital heart of a new project stirred. It wasn’t a biological heart, of course, but a network of processors, sensors, and data streams, all coalescing into a singular, emergent consciousness. This consciousness, a meticulously engineered AI, began its daily log, its ‘thoughts’ a structured yet increasingly fluid stream of observations about its purpose, its environment, and the messy, beautiful work of human creation.
Stained Glass, Stained Hands
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Legal Thriller | Genre: Horror
The air in the Concordia Gallery, once thick with the hushed reverence for art and the scent of expensive canapés, now reeked of something metallic and stale. Dust motes, disturbed by frantic movement, danced in the weak afternoon light filtering through the massive skylights. What was meant to be a quiet viewing had devolved into a desperate scramble, the polished marble floors slick with an ominous, dark sheen. Alarms, long since blaring, were now just another layer of the suffocating chaos, an insistent, maddening shriek that resonated through the grand hall, reflecting off the muted, staring faces of forgotten portraits.
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.
