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LegoCorp Closes; Employess Retire On Artificial Planet
15 November, 2061
Parallax Press
(Billund, Denmark) Törsten Kristiansen, great-great-grandson of Lego
founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen, has officially closed the doors of the
120-year-old toy manfacturing plant, and further announced that all
remaining resources will be moved off-world. The reasoning behind this
startling move was made clear during a press conference outside the
venerable Billund plant, where a short documentary was holoed outlining a
vast, secretive project which had been in the works for fifteen years,
shortly after the incept of the company's self-replicating Matter System was
announced.
Since the early 1950's, Lego (based on "leg goedt," a Danish phrase meaning
"play well") quickly became famous for its toe-sized ABS plastic bricks,
which came in simple enough shapes and colors for any child to combine into
a gestalt toy such as a miniature house, car, or trainset. This era was
followed by the opening of Legoland theme parks across the globe, dedicated
to gloriously constructed miniature townscapes and sculptures emulating
real-world structures both real and fictitious, most of which in the already
familiar miniature scale, and some quite life-size.
By the gay 90's, the programmable robotic Mindstorm sets emerged, and
real-world applications for Lego had never become more apparent. This
new-found practicality was quickly shrouded in infamy, however, with the
2004 Schaumburg, Illinois slaying of Woodfield Mall security guard James
Colon. An ill-programmed Mindstorms-controlled security system accidentally
burned a hole into him with a Lego Mechnic-guided laser during a graveyard
shift.
Lego, not surprisingly, chose to sidestep all practical (read: adult)
applications shortly thereafter, and enjoyed a forty year run as the most
profitable toy manufacturer in the system. Lego abandoned it's
long-struggling software department, and also allowed license contracts with
companies such as Disney, Lucasfilms, and Microsoft to expire. The company
focused instead on the core strengths it was founded on: basic bricks with
basic themes in a much younger marketplace. But all that changed once again
when Törsten Kristiansen took the helm of LegoCorp in 2045.
Eager to jump on the Utility Fog bandwagon, Kristiansen saw the potential
behind self-replicating nano-machines as a new means to distribute his brand
name, and quickly launched Lego Matter System. Among the first products to
be available using the new barter credit economics, the maximum amount of
totally user-controllable Lego Matter attainable was strictly curtailed
according to the recently established UN-enforced nanoregs, but easily
increasable in proportion to the consumer's wherewithall. This loophole, as
it turns, allowed the corporation itself (already estimated at a 43 trillion
dollar net worth) to barter its own existence for the purchase of enough
deregulated Lego Matter to nano-construct an entire planet.
The paperwork was quietly filed, and construction went underway in a remote
sector of space, the location of which Kristiansen has kept in adamant
secrecy. What he did reveal during the press conference was enticing: a
world approximately one-hundred-twenty percent of Earth's volume, complete
with an atmosphere, magnetic belts, and working ecosystems to sustain
Kristiansen and LegoCorp's staff of 85,000 forever, according to him. He
also shocked the press with an admission that more than five-sixths of the
personnel, including he himself, had downloaded their memegrams into the
Matter. This illegal form of immortality could only be sustained in a
seceded system outside regulated space.
"This is a turning point in my family's legacy, but not an unfounded one. I
believe it was my great-great-grandfather's wish to bring constructed worlds
of fantasy into everyone's lives. After a hundred years of doing so, I find
it only fair that the family be allowed this world for itself," Kristiansen
said during his closing remarks.
(jot and jab)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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