Glimpses of Futures: Unfinished Narratives
Enter a collection of short stories, presented as incomplete narrative fragments that offer a glimpse into various worlds. Each piece feels like a scene interrupted, a moment frozen in time, inviting readers to consider what precedes it and what follows. These are pages that prompt imaginative completion.
The project investigates the synergy between human creativity and artificial intelligence. It showcases how digital tools can act as a crucial partner in the writing process, fostering new expressions of storytelling and enhancing digital literacy. This collaboration seeks to expand the boundaries of creative output.
This selection features diverse genres, from the growth of coming-of-age stories to the futuristic grit of cyberpunk, alongside contemporary fiction and unsettling horror. All entries in this particular post are from Jamie F. Bell.
We encourage you to engage with these unfinished tales. Your interpretation and imagination are key to completing these unique narratives, transforming them into a personal and rich reading experience.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Discover captivating short stories in genres like Coming-of-Age, Cyberpunk, Contemporary Fiction, and Horror, alongside categories such as Slice of Life, Science Fiction, and Journalistic approaches. Our mission fosters digital literacy, investigating AI-assisted narrative development and the evolving landscape of publishing through cutting-edge creative technology.
Plastic Needles in July
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Slice of Life | Genre: Coming-of-Age
A suffocatingly hot attic in mid-July, filled with the debris of decades. The air smells of baked insulation and old cardboard.
The Hum of Burnt Wires
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Science Fiction | Genre: Cyberpunk
The scavenged data-slate felt hot in Corey’s hands, a dangerous warmth that had nothing to do with its overworked processor. Below him, the Undermarket seethed with activity, a chaotic mess of noodle stalls, vapour lounges, and black-market component shops, all packed under the perpetually dripping underbelly of the city’s pristine upper levels. Every public console, every glowing advertisement, every citizen’s wrist-mounted interface was a node in the Stream, the curated flow of information that kept the city stable. And the file he possessed was a virus aimed at its heart.
Echoes on the Screen
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Journalistic | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The air in the small meeting room hung heavy, thick with the scent of old coffee, sun-baked wood, and the faint, metallic tang of new electronics. Outside, a humid summer day pressed against the windows, the lake beyond them a shimmering, indifferent blue. Inside, three figures huddled around a laptop, the bright screen a stark contrast to the quiet tension that had slowly, imperceptibly, built between them.
Jagged Refractions
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Horror | Genre: Horror
The air was thick, a metallic tang of rust and the cloying sweetness of rot. Rain had found its way through gaps in the corrugated roof, painting streaks of grime down warped plywood walls. Every groan of the decaying structure echoed, a symphony of decay in the damp, cool spring morning. Somewhere, a distorted, tinny music box tune scratched at the edge of hearing, just loud enough to be an insult.
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.
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.
