Minds at War, Secrets Unveiled
This collection offers a distinct experience through its unfinished tales, presenting short stories that feel like pages torn from larger, unfolding works. Each piece is a glimpse into a world already in progress, designed to spark curiosity and challenge readers to construct the narrative whole from its intriguing parts.
This project is an experimental program at the intersection of human creativity, interdisciplinary arts, and applied artificial intelligence research. Its purpose is to explore how digital tools can partner in the writing process, shaping new forms of storytelling, scriptwriting, and enhancing digital literacy skills and workflows.
In this post, the collection moves through the internal conflicts of Psychological Drama and the immediate realities of Contemporary Fiction, alongside the intricate puzzles of Mystery and the disciplined world of Military Fiction. These narratives are brought to life by authors Jamie F. Bell and Eva Suluk.
We invite you to engage with these stories by allowing your imagination to expand their boundaries. Consider yourself a collaborator in their creation, piecing together the unwritten chapters and finding personal meaning in their open-ended forms.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
A Compass Without North
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Romance | Genre: Psychological Drama
The old truck rumbled over cracked asphalt, the hum of the tyres a familiar drone against the backdrop of an endless summer sky. Dust, fine as flour, coated everything, clinging to the sparse, sun-drained evergreens that lined the highway. A humid stillness pressed down, thick with the scent of pine and something metallic from the engine, a silent promise of afternoon thunderstorms looming on the distant, bruised horizon. This stretch of road felt like a forgotten artery, leading to places no one truly remembered, where time moved differently, slower, more deliberately.
The Pressure Valve
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Steampunk Adventures | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The air in the cavernous factory hung thick and still, tasting of damp metal and a faint, acrid tang of something burning deep within the intricate guts of the contraption. Frost feathered the inside of the vast, grimy windowpanes, obscuring the pale, winter afternoon. A cold so profound it seemed to leach the warmth from bone seeped from the concrete floor, curling up around Teddy’s heavy, insulated boots. Every breath he took plumed before him, a fleeting cloud against the dim, artificial light struggling from a few bare bulbs overhead. The silence was not empty; it was a tense, brittle thing, punctuated by the shuddering sighs of the vast machine, a metallic beast of brass and iron, that dominated the centre of the derelict space. It groaned, a deep, resonant sound, like a creature in agony, and a shiver ran down the length of Teddy’s spine, unrelated to the pervasive cold.
The Riverbend Anomaly
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Young Adult Contemporary | Genre: Mystery
The stifling Winnipeg summer heat pressed in, even within the dusty, air-conditioned chill of the Riverbend Arts Collective’s archives. Maria, an intern, navigated stacks of forgotten creativity, a task meant to be mundane, but then her fingers brushed against something out of place—a plain cardboard box, devoid of labels, emitting a faint, almost imperceptible hum that resonated beneath her fingertips.
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.
The Unlit Harbinger
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Comedy | Genre: Military Fiction
The wind, a malevolent, unseen entity, whipped through the parade square, carrying with it the scent of damp earth and distant, churning diesel. Every gust threatened to pluck the earflaps from under Captain Napson’s service cap, his face already a deepening crimson against the grey, unforgiving sky. Below the flagpole, an evergreen, monstrous in its height and girth, stood as a monument to unfulfilled festive ambition. Its branches, stiff with latent ice, seemed to mock the two figures who stood before it, contemplating their impossible task. The air bit at exposed skin, promising chilblains and frostnip, a bleak pre-Christmas forecast.
Storytelling and the Arts, Skills Development and Digital Transformation
AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting: As part of our “Storytelling and the Arts” initiative, we are actively exploring AI’s transformative role in creative development, specifically through its application in Psychological Drama, Mystery, Contemporary Fiction, and Military Fiction. Our studies investigate AI’s capacity to handle genre-specific challenges like developing nuanced character motivations and internal conflicts essential for Psychological Drama, constructing perplexing plots and red herrings for Mystery, capturing the authenticity of daily life in Contemporary Fiction, and detailing accurate military environments and experiences in Military Fiction. We aim to understand how AI aids in crafting compelling narratives, refining dialogue, and generating fresh plot twists tailored to these distinct storytelling forms.
Talent Development and Training: A core component of our research focuses on the essential skills creative professionals require in an increasingly AI-driven environment. The process of crafting these particular chapters, spanning from deep character studies to intricate mysteries and realistic military narratives, serves as a practical blueprint for the future of digital publishing and film production workflows. We emphasize the development of robust digital literacy, the art of effective prompt engineering, and strategic management of AI tools, enabling artists and writers to harness these technologies as collaborative partners. This approach prepares them to innovate and lead within the rapidly evolving creative industries.
We’re excited to learn about these new technologies and how they can be applied to expand the boundaries of human storytelling. We encourage you to keep reading, keep imagining, and keep exploring the incredible potential that opens up when creativity meets technology.
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 interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment. It is part of a creative arts and research program by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners collectives. This project focuses on two key areas: AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting, exploring AI for generating ideas, plot structures, and alternative story arcs; and Talent Development and Training, studying the skills and training needs for creative professionals managing AI and immersive technologies to inform future training curricula. Funding and support were generously provided by the Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program and the Government of Ontario. We thank them for supporting the arts, digital transformation, and applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) research for northern innovation in Ontario.
About the Author
