Unraveling Futures and Urban Enigmas
These short stories arrive as incomplete tales, each a moment captured mid-scene, inviting speculation and completion. They function like carefully selected excerpts from larger, unseen works, encouraging you to imagine the full context. This approach fosters a direct, collaborative relationship between the text and your own creative thoughts.
This project is an exploration into the dynamic partnership between human creativity and artificial intelligence. It investigates how digital tools can assist in the writing process, helping to forge new styles of storytelling and enhancing digital literacy through practical application in literary development.
This collection features stories that span the intriguing depths of Urban Mystery, the immediate relevance of Contemporary Fiction, and the technological futures of Cyberpunk, Techno-Thriller, and Sci-Fi. Authors Eva Suluk and Jamie F. Bell contribute their distinct voices to this compelling selection of unfinished tales.
We invite you to engage with these fragments. Your role as a reader extends to that of a co-creator, completing the narrative arcs and imagining the full scope of these stories within your own mind.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Engage with compelling short stories spanning Urban Mystery, Cyberpunk, and Sci-Fi, interwoven with Gritty Realism and Dark Comedy. This project advances digital literacy by investigating AI-assisted narrative, demonstrating how creative technology is revolutionizing publishing and charting the future of digital content.
The Brittle Spine of an Old Paperback
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Gritty Realism | Genre: Urban Mystery
The bookshop smelt of decaying paper, leather polish, and Earl Grey tea. It was a scent Nana had cultivated over twenty years, a barricade of comforting aromas against the city’s exhaust-fume reality. Sunlight, thick with floating dust, slanted through the tall front window, illuminating precarious towers of books that leaned against every available surface. In the quiet, the only sounds were the gentle creak of floorboards and the soft rustle of a page being turned.
The Geometry of Leaving
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Slice of Life | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
This part of the city doesn’t have the curated history of the Exchange. This is where the past hasn’t been sandblasted and repurposed for loft apartments. The ghost signs on Sargent Avenue are for bakeries run by families whose names I can’t pronounce, for delis that sold pickles out of a barrel, for little cinemas with sticky floors. It feels more honest, somehow. Less like a museum piece and more like a well-read book with a broken spine.
The Chill Current of Departure
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Historical Fiction | Genre: Cyberpunk
The city sprawled beneath a perpetually bruised sky, its endless towers spearing into the grey. A bitter wind, laden with ice particles and the metallic tang of exhaust, scoured the skeletal structures of Sector Seven. Neon arteries pulsed, indifferent to the encroaching winter, casting an anemic glow across the slick, frost-rimmed rooftops. Every exhalation was a ghost in the frigid air, a transient plume against the relentless, cold architecture of a future unasked for.
The Glacial Unveiling
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Magical Realism | Genre: Techno-Thriller
The old community hall smelled faintly of damp wool and stale coffee, a scent that clung to the worn linoleum and the plastic chairs arranged in a loose circle. Outside, the early winter night was already a profound, inky black, only occasionally broken by the distant, spectral shimmer of the northern lights, a constant reminder of how far north they truly were. Inside, the fluorescent lights hummed with a low, insistent buzz, casting a harsh, unyielding glow on the faces around the table, a stark contrast to the soft, shifting sky beyond the frost-rimmed windows.
Rust-Belt Constellations
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Dark Comedy | Genre: Sci-Fi
The roof of the old Monarch Mill was the best place in town to see the stars. Up here, the orange glow of the streetlights was muted, and the sky opened up, vast and pricked with light. The gritty surface of the tar paper was still warm from the day’s heat, a pleasant contrast to the cooling late-August air that carried the faint, metallic scent of the nearby rail yard.
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.
