@Caledonian You say you're not interested in human stories, but instead in:

"Systems that initially attract my attention, are sufficiently ordered so that I can form expectations about them, but sufficiently unpredictable such that my expectations are violated in comprehensible-yet-unexpected ways."

Don't humans meet these criteria?

I wonder if certain cognitive biases aren't essential to storytelling. You could almost define "story" in terms of the absence of probability - while 'overcoming bias' is to a large extent a matter of forcing oneself to think in probabilistic terms.

(I don't include poetry in this)