Rubiklock

In the mid-80's, an evil was unleashed upon the world, the likes of which haven't been seen since the H-bomb.

It wasn't the cold war.
It wasn't Exxon Valdez.
It wasn't worldwide famine.

It was a little plastic cube, made up of little bricks designed to twist this way and that in vain hopes of aligning all of the colors correctly.

It was the spawn of Satan.

Sold by the millions, the demon possessed little cubes would try their best to wreak havoc upon stability and peace. It was great fun for psychotics, prison inmates, and the severely mathematically disturbed. It would tease idle minds with states of seeming near-completion, push fragile psychologies permanently over the precupice of sanity, and cause a horrific spike in the study of algorithmic programming modules years later.

Thankfully, heavenly angels largely contained the threat using the perpetual garage sale method, where the infernal devices are eventually contained in church rummage sales, exorcised, and smashed by five-year-olds. However, a few still lurk.

As penitence for their wicked schemes, we have captured two exorcised cubes and enslaved them to solve themselves every 6 hours and perform a completely trivial duty to mankind.

Each hour, the two cubes reconfigure themselves to show the hourly time, arranging the black bricks into the standard dot arrangements found on a pair of dice. Between 1:00-6:00, one cube remains solved, while the other displays the appropriate number of dots. Between 7:00 and 12:00, the other cube kicks in as well. At the a.m.-p.m. switch, they alternate assignments to conserve battery power.

Inside each cube, a six-output mini-servo motor handles the rotational needs of each face plane. The clock automatically sets itself according to the international atomic clock broadcast frequency, having a built-in radio transceiver and cube positional sensors. The servos are simply friction-fitted to the face centerblocks, should anyone have the outlandish desire to actually pick one up again and play with it. And each cube is color-coded to its stand, should they become inadvertantly switched.

Minutes displayed separately.