Parablox

Parablox was a children's toy released during the Christmas shopping season of 1998. Every packet contained several multicoloured interlocking bricks made of plastic polymer and threaded with a minimum-lode biodata stream, which made the blocks aware but not actually intelligent.

The Parablox sets were four-dimensional metastructures. The smallest set, containing only 35 pieces, could be built into a pocket-sized naked singularity; the biggest and most expensive set was the Universe in a Cardboard Box. A website that accompanied the toy's release included plans for a working black hole made of Parablox. However, there was no advertising campaign for Parablox, and much of the stock was still unsold when the Great Houses excised Parablox from the timeline shortly after Christmas. As a result, it was unlikely that many Universe in a Cardboard Box sets were sold or that any collector ever acquired enough black bricks to create the black hole, even though the website pointed out that light vanished beyond the event horizon and the amateur builder could use blue bricks inside the Schwarzschild radius without anyone ever noticing.

It was impossible to build any kind of temporal paradox with the Parablox bricks, since the structure would inevitably fall to pieces before it could be completed.

The Book of the War posited that, since no War era faction had a reason to create or distribute it, Parablox was a techno-cultural glitch that grew in the timeline to fill a niche left in 20th century culture by the overlapping influences of the Great Houses, the Remote, and Faction Paradox. Since the children who received sets for Christmas 1998 served a far better chance of developing spatial and time awareness skills in later life, the Book said that it might have been one of the few truly positive things to have emerged during the War era. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Behind the scenes

• Parablox appears to be LEGO with added biodata.
• The Book of the War states in different places that Parablox were released in the Christmas seasons of 1987 and 1998. However, since the entry discusses the product's website at some length, and the first website was created in 1991, the 1987 date can be understood as the error.
• The entry for Parablox in the novel The Book of the War was the only entry that had no links to other articles and was not linked to by any other articles.