Gears, Deserts, Growth, and Grim Humor
This collection features short stories designed as intriguing glimpses into larger narratives. Each piece is an intriguing glimpse, a moment frozen in time that invites the reader to ponder what has transpired and what might yet unfold. They encourage active engagement, transforming reading into an act of creative completion.
This project explores the collaborative potential at the intersection of human ingenuity and artificial intelligence. Its aim is to showcase how digital instruments can partner with writers, shaping innovative narrative forms and advancing concepts of digital literacy within literary creation.
Today’s selection ranges across distinctive genres: imaginative Steampunk, rugged Western, formative Coming-of-Age, relatable Slice of Life, and sharp Dark Comedy. These captivating unfinished tales are brought to you by Jamie F. Bell and Leaf Richards, whose combined talents illuminate these varied worlds.
We encourage you to engage with these narratives as more than just stories; see them as opportunities. Your imagination holds the key to connecting the dots and crafting their full narrative arcs.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Explore unique short stories across Steampunk, Western, Coming-of-Age, Slice of Life, and Dark Comedy, alongside Psychological Drama, Contemporary Fiction, Western Style BL, Paranormal Romance, and Romance categories. We champion digital literacy by exploring AI-assisted narrative, utilizing creative technology to advance publishing and contribute to the future of digital publishing.
The Perils of Brass and Steam
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Psychological Drama | Genre: Steampunk
The hiss of a misaligned steam valve was the first thing that tipped me off. It was a sharp, angry sound, quite unlike the usual gentle chuffing and whirring of the factory floor. I looked up from my ledger, the ink still wet on my calculation of rivet expenditures, and saw it. The Morag-Model 7, our new automaton floor manager, was standing over poor Timothy from assembly, one of its polished brass hands clamped firmly on his shoulder. Steam vented from its neck-joints in furious white puffs. This was not part of its standard employee interaction protocol.
The Whispering Gulch
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Contemporary Fiction | Genre: Western
The air, thick and still, felt like a wool blanket thrown over the whole world. Redemption Gulch simmered under a sky the colour of bleached bone, the kind of summer afternoon where the heat itself seemed to press down on your lungs, making every breath a chore. Marie-Anne, her braids already escaping their ties and sticking to the back of her neck, squinted against the glare. The path leading out of town, a pale scar across the baked earth, wound its way towards the foothills, where the mountains, distant and purple, shimmered with heat. Today, though, their destination wasn’t the distant peaks but the closer, forgotten pockets of the gulch, where childhood dares and whispered legends often intersected.
A Trellis for the Unruly Vine
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Western Style BL | Genre: Coming-of-Age
The community centre’s workshop smelled of sawdust, old paint, and the faint, lingering odour of decades of bingo nights. It was a cavern of organized chaos, filled with half-finished projects for the upcoming BayFest. In the centre of it all, looking like a skeletal whale beached on a sea of drop cloths, was the frame of the Historical Society’s float.
Finite Dust
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Paranormal Romance | Genre: Slice of Life
It’s a lie that dust is silent. It has a voice, a dry, papery whisper that speaks of shed skin and crumbled memories, and tonight, in the suffocating stillness of the archive, it is the only sound I can reliably name. The dehumidifier offers its monotonous, asthmatic hum from the corner, a mechanical prayer against the damp that forever threatens to turn this collection of a town’s life into a pulpy, unreadable mass of mould. But the dust is the true historian here, settling with democratic indifference on the pension records of lumber barons and the chipped teacups of farmers’ wives.
A Fine Dusting of Despair
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Romance | Genre: Dark Comedy
The air in the clearing carried the sharp, metallic tang of rust and the deeper, sweeter decay of wet leaves. What remained of the old ‘Recovery Depot’ sign dangled precariously from a single bolt, creaking a mournful rhythm against the steady, relentless wind. The few ramshackle buildings, grey and skeletal against the deepening autumn sky, seemed to sag further into the earth with each passing year. It was a place where hope had not merely faded, but had been meticulously catalogued and then, probably, forgotten in a poorly labelled box.
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.
