After Italo Calvino’s story. A house burns with its four tenants: the widow Roessler, her adopted daughter Ogiva, the landlord Inigo and the wrestler Belindo. A copybook survives with only its index: twelve abominable deeds, and no record of who did what to whom. The tenants are flour sacks. Every deed can be done by any tenant to any other, so the copybook could have told 1212 stories. These are the films, the bank that plays any of them, and the sheets they were built from.
Nov 2026 · Watson Hartsoe · made with the SCION swarms
The story told once, from the ruins to the copybook to the count. The house is a doll’s-house section; the sacks stand in its rooms.
Play it live in the browser, drawn frame by frame from code.
One random choice of who did each deed, played straight through: a chapter card, the tenant remembering, a transition, the deed, and what it leaves behind.
The story a Monte Carlo tree search rated most believable given who the tenants are. Slower: each chapter card holds, and only the seven heaviest consequences are kept.
The narrated classroom version, with the programmer’s room, the corkboard and the counter, is on the Lab 7 page.
Choose any story, or let the tenants decide with memories, beliefs and plans. T ZERO freezes a deed and shows the twelve ways it could go. The atlas maps 6,030 films; SIX MEMOS shows the best film of each kind; the author buttons write for irony, suspense or twists.
the deed bankEvery deed by every pairEach of the twelve deeds animated by a different SCION operation, playable between any two tenants, with its sound.
the numbersTwelve to the twelfthThe story space on one ruler, Calvino’s rules counted exactly, the agents, the watcher, the archive, and the readings behind each part.
the first film, liveThe story, drawn in codeThe first film running in the page instead of from video, with its sound.
Twelve deeds, one SCION operation each. Each sheet shows one deed performed across pairs of tenants, kept PG-13: the sexual deeds are implied, never shown.
The consequence beats: the rope mark, the blood on the floor, the police at the door, the body moved. Nothing happens without a trace.
One memory swarm per tenant. When a tenant acts again, the film first shows what it is carrying.
Thirteen transitions so that any deed can follow any other and the film reads as one piece.
| What | How many |
|---|---|
| possible stories, 12 deeds × 12 ordered pairs | 8,916,100,448,256 |
| left after the story’s five rules (Belindo does not knife, and so on), counted exactly | 2,663,172,255,744 |
| consistent stories: no dead or tied tenant acts, counted exactly | 3,316,025,558,016 |
| stories where each tenant commits three deeds and suffers three, Calvino’s symmetry | 5,112,676,800 |
| stories written by the agents in one run, three modes of reasoning | 1,000,000 |
| three-deed openings, all run; the different houses they leave | 1,728 · 589 |
| animated modules: deeds, consequences, memories, transitions | 12 · 12 · 4 · 13 |
Full figures and sources: Twelve to the Twelfth.