Surviving Futures: Tales Interrupted
Discover a series of short stories, each an incomplete narrative fragment, designed to ignite your curiosity. These are not fully realized plots, but rather evocative moments captured mid-scene, resembling pages deliberately torn from a broader narrative. We encourage you to envision the missing chapters and the story’s trajectory.
This project explores the dynamic relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence. It demonstrates how digital tools can act as an integral partner in the writing process, cultivating new forms of storytelling and advancing digital literacy. The initiative seeks to expand creative possibilities.
Today’s selection ranges from the stark realities of post-apocalyptic settings to the tension of a corporate thriller, with moments of slice of life, chilling horror, and action-adventure. All stories in this particular collection are by Jamie F. Bell.
We invite you to engage with these unfinished tales, allowing your personal interpretations to guide their completion. Your imagination is the final architect, giving these stories their ultimate form and meaning.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Engage with compelling short stories exploring Post-Apocalyptic settings, Corporate Thriller suspense, Slice of Life moments, Horror, and Action-Adventure, alongside categories such as Science Fiction, Western Style BL, and Young Adult (YA) themes. This initiative promotes digital literacy, investigating AI-assisted narrative to redefine publishing and empower creative technology.
Rust and Silt
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Post-Apocalyptic Survival | Genre: Post-Apocalyptic
The air hung heavy and still, smelling of damp earth and something indefinable, metallic, as John pushed aside a curtain of skeletal branches. The forest, once a vibrant green blur, now wore the muted, bruised colours of a perpetual autumn, even as the real autumn began its slow, inevitable crawl. Every fallen leaf, every shadow, seemed to hold a breath of warning, a silent testament to the invisible shift that had permanently scarred their world.
The Glass Apiary
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Science Fiction | Genre: Corporate Thriller
From her desk on the forty-seventh floor, Paula viewed the world as a series of cascading data streams. The city below was a distant, silent abstraction, but on her three monitors, it was a living, breathing organism of sentiment and opinion. Her job at Axiom was to nudge that organism, to gently guide the public conversation about their clients away from inconvenient topics and towards positive engagement. She was a narrative architect, and today, the architecture was behaving strangely.
The Shortcut
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Western Style BL | Genre: Slice of Life
A damp, wind-swept path behind the university science labs, covered in slick mud and rotting leaves, where an art student fights a losing battle with gravity and a heavy prop.
The Strange Gravity of Gravy
Category: Slice of Life | Genre: Horror
The cafeteria was, as always, a symphony of adolescent chaos: the clatter of trays, the shrill laughter of newly-formed cliques, the low thrum of a thousand whispered secrets. Sunlight, thick and golden from the late autumn afternoon, spilled across the linoleum floor, catching dust motes in its wide, indifferent gaze. A familiar smell of burnt cheese and industrial cleaner hung heavy, a comforting, if unappetising, blanket. Yet, for Frank, the ordinary theatre of lunchtime felt strangely… perforated, as if the reality around them was a film projector skipping frames.
The Scoured Periphery
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Young Adult (YA) | Genre: Action-Adventure
The crisp bite of an autumn afternoon had curdled into something metallic and acrid. The air, usually redolent with damp earth and pine, now carried the tang of ozone and scorched electronics. A low, persistent hum vibrated through the pavement, a sound that had been background noise for weeks, now magnified to a terrifying, palpable threat. Smoke plumed from the east, an angry smudge against the bruised purple of the late afternoon sky, painting the familiar streets in hues of alarm.
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.
