Weekly Unfinished Tales and Short Stories from our Dataset
Welcome to our daily collection of narrative experiments from the ‘Unfinished Tales and Short Stories’ project. These short stories and story fragments are drawn directly from our ongoing creative arts and research program, an interdisciplinary exploration into the evolving landscape of narrative. At its heart, this project was undertaken for fun, driven by a simple curiosity to see what we could do and learn when combining human creativity with emerging technologies in the pursuit of storytelling.
These narrative seeds serve a dual purpose within our research framework. For our study into AI-Assisted Scriptwriting, they act as foundational prompts and test cases, allowing us to explore how generative models can be used to develop plot structures, create alternative story arcs, and generate novel ideas. Concurrently, these tales are integral to our Talent Development and Training focus, providing tangible material for creative professionals to study the skills required to manage AI tools, enhance digital literacy, and foster the interdisciplinary approaches necessary for navigating the future of immersive and technologically-assisted creative industries.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
The Glint in the Murmur
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Horror | Genre: Dystopian
The air, thick with the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves, hung heavy over the city. Rust-coloured sycamores scraped against the bruised twilight sky, their skeletal branches making a brittle music against the persistent, low hum that had settled into the very foundations of the world. It was a sound that existed just beneath perception, like the thrum of blood in one’s own ears, only external and omnipresent. Lamplight, the few remaining, cast long, wavering shadows across cobbled alleyways, illuminating patches of condensation that clung like cold sweat to brickwork. The usual hurried evening chatter was gone, replaced by a sporadic, disquieting quiet broken by distant, unidentifiable sounds that made the back of my neck prickle. Autumn, with its melancholic beauty, had never felt quite so… brittle.
The Sky’s Fever
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Horror | Genre: Dystopian
The morning sun, usually a balm, felt like an interrogation lamp today, highlighting every disquieting detail. A strange, almost imperceptible haze still clung to the air, a leftover from the previous night’s celestial spectacle. It wasn’t smoke, nor fog, but something thinner, more insidious, that seemed to cling to the edges of vision, making the world shimmer faintly, as if seen through old, rippled glass. The birds, usually raucous with the arrival of spring, offered only a few tentative chirps, their songs cut short, as if remembering a tune they no longer quite understood. Beneath the oppressive quiet, a low, persistent hum thrummed just beneath the threshold of hearing, a mechanical pulse that had become the new soundtrack to existence.
Rust-Tinted Prairie’s Reach
Author: Tony Eetak | Category: Horror | Genre: Historical Fiction
The old Ford Pinto droned, a persistent, metallic hum that had become the rhythmic pulse of their escape. Outside, the vast flatness of Manitoba was slowly contorting, growing teeth of rock and forest as they pushed deeper into Ontario. Spring’s damp breath coated the windows, blurring the sparse, skeletal birches that flickered past like ghostly sentinels, and an insidious chill, not just from the weather, had begun to seep into the car’s threadbare upholstery.
Asphalt’s Fevered Pulse
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Journalistic | Genre: Historical Fiction
The Chevrolet Bel Air, a tank of rust and ambition, chewed up the kilometres, its exhaust pipe rattling a rhythm against the endless prairie. Heat shimmered off the asphalt in waves, distorting the horizon into a watery mirage. Inside, the stale air conditioner groaned, barely winning against the August sun beating down on the cracked vinyl seats. The radio crackled, half-tuned to a distant rock station, the tinny guitar solos barely audible over the wind noise. Every surface felt sticky. This was freedom, or at least the sweaty, slightly uncomfortable prelude to it, and it was stretching out, flat and boundless, towards something they couldn’t quite see.
A Highway of Scratched Promises
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Epistolary | Genre: Cyberpunk
The asphalt shimmered, a long, grey ribbon unwinding under a sky the colour of a faded denim jacket. Inside the automated ‘Cruiser’—its designation a relic of a bygone era—the air conditioning whirred a quiet, persistent hymn against the summer heat. Winnipeg’s receding cityscape, a fractal mess of glinting towers and smog-smudged low-rises, finally gave way to the monotonous green of prairie fields, punctuated by the skeletal frames of automated agri-farms. Jack, slouched in the passenger seat, fiddled with a stray thread on his cargo shorts, while Penny, hands resting loosely on the haptic steering interface, watched the highway flow under them.
Design Notes and Applied Research
This daily collection highlights a compelling intersection of genre and form. The featured Dystopian, Cyberpunk, and Historical Fiction narratives serve as frameworks for examining the profound impacts of societal and technological transformation. By employing Horror, Journalistic, and Epistolary approaches, our creators refined specific narrative techniques while directly engaging with the project’s core themes of skills development within a changing artistic landscape.
The convergence of these distinct styles proved to be a productive and engaging experiment. This exploration challenged participants to adapt classic storytelling structures to address the opportunities and anxieties of the digital age. The resulting works stand as a valuable inquiry into the evolving nature of narrative arts and the creative potential unlocked through focused, cross-disciplinary practice.
About the Project
The Unfinished Tales and Short Stories collection was an interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment in 2025. It was part of a creative arts and participatory research project by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners collectives. It focuses on two key areas: AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting, exploring AI tools for generating ideas, plot structures, and story arcs; and Talent Development and Training, studying digital skills, literacy and training needs for creative professionals by experimenting with AI and immersive technologies to inform future projects. 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.
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