the-voice-of-light-city:

for those of you who aren’t aware of parablox, or just for anybody who feels like encountering a bit of pure joy today, really:

PARABLOX [Lesser Species: Technology]

‘There’s no way I can take this time-spiral apart without using my teeth.’
- Traditional.

Children’s toy, marketed in certain western European states shortly before Christmas 1987, although by the end of the Christmas period all remaining stock had been erased from the shelves thanks to the intervention of the Great Houses.

Every packet of Parablox contained a number of multicoloured interlocking bricks, each one moulded from a plastic polymer and threaded with a minimum-lode biodata stream, making the blocks aware but not actually intelligent. Parablox models were generally four-dimensional metastructures, although their efficiency varied according to their aesthetic elegance. The smallest set, consisting of only 35 pieces, could be assembled into a pocket-sized naked singularity: the largest ostensibly contained enough pieces to build an entire bubble universe, but as a great deal of Parablox stock was still unsold when the toy was excised (there was no advertising campaign, and no apparent drive to make the product fashionable) few of these expensive Universe-in-a-Cardboard-Box sets would actually have been sold. A short-lived website accompanied the toy’s release, where plans could be found for a working Parablox black hole, yet it’s doubtful that any purchaser ever acquired enough black bricks to complete the design. Although, as the website pointed out, light vanishes beyond the event horizon anyway and the amateur builder could get away with using blue bricks inside the Schwartzchild radius without anybody ever noticing.

Parablox was clearly a trivial amusement, a minor techno-cultural glitch in the timeline. But in fairness, it should be pointed out that those children who did receive sets for Christmas 1998 stood a far better chance of developing time-awareness skills, not to mention more straightforward spatial awareness skills, in later life. It’s thus possible that it may be one of the few truly positive things to emerge during the War Era.