Open-Ended Narratives
Each of these short stories offers a unique glimpse into a larger, unwritten world, presenting moments captured mid-narrative. They are pieces of imagination, designed to engage and provoke thought, leaving space for the reader to speculate on their origins and destinations. This format encourages a deeper, more active form of reading, inviting personal completion.
This project articulates a goal of exploring the unique intersection of human creativity and artificial intelligence. It demonstrates how digital tools can serve as a partner in the writing process, fostering new forms of storytelling and contributing to the development of digital literacy across different creative fields.
This collection spans genres from the high stakes of Action-Adventure and the detailed worlds of Hard Sci-Fi to the personal journeys of Coming-of-Age, the emotional depth of Contemporary Drama, and the broader scope of Contemporary Fiction. Within this selection, the distinct contributions of Leaf Richards and Jamie F. Bell offer distinctive insights into these diverse narrative territories.
We encourage you to delve into these stories, allowing your own insights to shape their possibilities. Your imaginative participation is central to bringing these unfinished tales to their own unique conclusions.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
This post presents diverse short stories in Action-Adventure, Hard Sci-Fi, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary Drama, and Contemporary Fiction, extending to Sports Fiction, Expository, Grimdark Fantasy, and Western Style BL categories. Our mission is to promote digital literacy and redefine publishing by investigating AI-assisted narrative and leveraging creative technology for future literary endeavors.
Against the Burned Path
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Sports Fiction | Genre: Action-Adventure
The humid summer air hung heavy, thick with the scent of hot asphalt and something acrid from the nearby industrial estate. Sunlight, brutal and unyielding, baked the concrete labyrinth of the abandoned factory complex. Rust stained the corrugated metal walls, and weeds, defiant and tenacious, pushed through every crack and fissure in the ground, reclaiming territory from forgotten machinery.
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.
The Glacial Grin
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Contemporary Fiction | Genre: Coming-of-Age
A biting winter wind scoured the city, whipping around the grey towers of glass and steel. Snow, already old and gritty, clung to the corners of buildings and lay in crusty drifts along the sidewalks, reflecting a pale, indifferent light. Inside, the sterile hum of an office building offered little warmth, only the cold promise of another monotonous day.
The Tinsel
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Grimdark Fantasy | Genre: Contemporary Drama
The old house exhaled a sigh of perpetual cold, a thin layer of hoarfrost clinging to the inside of the kitchen windowpane. Dust motes, heavy and grey, danced reluctantly in the weak, early afternoon light that struggled through the overcast December sky. A large, battered cardboard box, taped shut with ancient, yellowed strips, sat accusingly by the hearth, its contents a silent, potent reminder of celebrations long past and wounds still unhealed.
A Gust of Sulphur and Sky
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Western Style BL | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The valley floor, usually a patchwork of parched earth and stubborn sage, had turned into a treacherous mire. Recent spring rains had carved new gullies, swollen the seasonal creeks, and left the track leading to the north pasture a ribbon of thick, clinging clay. The air tasted of damp soil and the distant, metallic tang of a spring storm still brewing over the ragged peaks. The quad bike, an ancient, rust-pocked beast, was mired halfway to its axles, its engine long since choked into silence, its metallic shell reflecting the bruised violet of the overhead clouds.
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.
