Chapter 11

Crap I knew this place looked like a shithole, but did I want to go in here with this Frankie person wielding a shotgun loaded with deer slugs? Surely my cell phone hacker friend wouldn’t send me to someone crazy enough to shoot me just for knocking. Would she? I haven’t tried to hook up with her in a while, but still...

Hearing it was quiet inside the apartment again, I reached up to rap on the door frame and ask, “Frankie? I was sent to come see you about a problem with my phone. A mutual friend said you might be able to help.”

“Sorry about that Joe. I was expecting you to come around, not that worthless fuck ex-stepfather. He thinks that just because he has two kids by my big sister that he can come in here whenever he wants. All that useless shit does is come here to drink beer and jack off. He has had a restraining order to stay the hell away from me since the day mom caught him fucking my sister,” Frankie told me. “Come on in, shut the door, throw the bolt, head up the stairs and then down the hall.”

Well that explained a lot. Too bad I had no idea if Frankie was a chick or dude. The face was sexless, hair was shoulder length with a natural curl, cut so that it would be fashionable for either sex. Frankie’s clothes consisted of black combat boots, grey baggy sweatpants, a way too large Dr. Who t-shirt and faded flannel shirt over the top. A woman could have double-d sized tits under that t-shirt and no one would be able to tell she was not flat chested without getting up really close.

“Toss it here,” Frankie told me when I made it up to an obvious techie workroom. “Got some really killer smoke on the table by the porch. Have a bowl or two if you want. Just take it outside.”

I tossed my phone over and took a seat in a damn comfortable, high-end gaming chair.

Got to get two of these. One for the office and one for home.

After a few minutes Frankie said, “Lazy ass wannabes phreakers. Can’t even follow basic install instructions made for a six year old and fucked up the tech to boot. Come look at this crap.”

When I got over to look at my phone I found it was under a microscope that displayed a 4 inch by 2.75 section of the phone’s circuit board up on a huge ultra-high definition flat screen monitor. I saw some scratches in the middle between what looked to be micro resistors or capacitors, but that was it.

“Here, here and here. Do you see it,” Frankie asked as she did something to make circles show on the monitor around three spots on the phone. “Shorted out the amplifier for radio, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi by trying to connect this to your phone.”

I was handed what looked like two tiny silver contacts the same size as the ones where my inductive charger connects on my phone. It looked like it was just a jumper, there seemed to be nothing inside.

Wrong!

Frankie had to have seen my confusion because two quick flips of a razor blade and she dropped something in a jar of some acidic smelling liquid. She plucked it out with long tweezers to drop it in another jar. It quickly turned that liquid into a blackish green color. It soon replaced my cell phone on the large monitor. I still had no idea what I was looking at. It seemed to be some form of extremely tiny circuit board, but I couldn’t see any components, just what looked like nearly invisible wires. Definitely smaller than the gold wires used to connect microchips to the pins on the edge of the chip packaging.

“Nanowires. Transistors, resistors and capacitors all printed directly onto silicon and transferred onto a simple flexible surface,” I was told. “This is a pitiful attempt to copy the one I made two years ago. Seems this is the best they could attempt to do. Mine were engineered to require a specific circuit to be maintained to keep the components from self-destructing. If it was disconnected from the phone, the built up charge in the capacitors would melt all the wiring and traces. I only sold them to people I trusted to not divulge what they were or who made them. Not exactly a woke of genius, but still not bad for the six hours I spent coming up with it. Very simple too. It connects onto the test contacts used for verifying radio output power on the phones. The outgoing signals were cloned and passed into a time division multiplexing circuit. This allowed for the cloned signal to be transmitted on a second frequency as if it was communicating with another cell in preparation for a hand off. It only adds a sub-millisecond delay as it switches between the two frequencies. Incoming signals are split to send a copy back out as well. Reversed engineered clones of my old design couldn’t recreate the power modulator I printed directly into the casing. Instead they overload the receiving side with a highly amplified signal that fries the associated radios. Not sure who you are tangled up with Joe, but they aren’t working for any foreign government types. This was sloppy. If a foreign agent had done this work they would be shot. Really. It was that badly done.”

Great. Looks like I pick up another phone somewhere. Damn what a hassle. I wonder if Frankie would hack it to get the new one to give me the good signal strength I had on the last one.

“Thanks for taking a look at it for me,” I said. “Where can I go find a decent phone store to get a replacement? I set them up with some custom code so they sync securely to my home setup. If the phone doesn’t connect to the servers every few hours it will wipe the phone using secure writes/rewrites after removing all inode data on the files. My usual bad luck had my phones magically disappearing inside airport x-ray machines. I got tired of having to wait for the moron to power it up so I could remote wipe it. Instead I wrote an app that made it useless by the time they got past the pin code. If I just misplaced it somewhere, I only need to hit up an encrypted web page that pulls the one-time installer. Once I get logged into the app, my servers start feeding it data via on-demand dynamically created web content, DHCP Dynamic DNS record block data and some stego ping packets.”

Frankie interrupted me to ask, “Why not just embed the data in YouTube, Snapchat or Facebook posts you can then delete?”

Smiling I explained, “Security, three letter alphabet agency data taps and lack of trust in those sites. Those services want verified accounts that can be traced back to me no matter how well hidden, obfuscated or spoofed the packets are between my phone and these locations. The data is collected, parsed and archived even after it has been deleted. Properly embedded, the request for a DNS record on a vulnerable dynamic DNS service will cause the payload containing entry to be created with a very short lifespan. It looks no different than any of the billions of other garbled entries coming into the server and vanishes as if it was culled by the automated cleanup processes. I only need 6k to be able to setup the encrypted link for pulling the rest of the app to my phone to install it.”

We geeked out about the different tech we had both made for a while before Frankie told me, “You don’t need to get a new phone Joe. The screen on this one is top notch and the digitizer has an excellent matrix for a phone. Let me cable it up to pull some specs and then I will give it to my recycler bot to strip out good stuff. The rest will get dumped into the parts bin to be sorted later.”

Do what?

I wasn’t sure what the hell that meant until my backless phone was pushed onto a padded base. Frankie closed the slightly scratched Plexiglas cover and hit the start button. The base seemed to magically mold tightly around the case

What the fuck is that thing moving over my phone? Is Frankie short for Frankenstein?

Maybe it was...

As I watched, my phone was moved all over the place as the huge 4k UHD monitor blinked a few times. Soon it switched to a view of the phone’s circuit board so detailed that I could see tiny divots from microscopic air bubbles in the flux or solder. On a smaller monitor I watched as the schematic for the circuitry was created showing all components on that side of the board. When it was done with that side of that board it moved back and another device moved in that pulled the battery, which Frankie had put back in for her tools to get data off the phone. That was soon replaced by yet another head with tiny tools that pulled the tiny ribbon cables loose. The first device was back in scanning the board under where the cables and battery had been.

The schematic was soon completed and then went away. Starting from scratch, the first device rescanned the board, but this time I could see it following each trace from end to end instead of doing a top to bottom scan. When finished, the two schematics were overlaid. In four places they differed, so those areas were scanned again. It seemed that her software figured out the issue and sent over a device with screwdrivers to pull all the screws it could locate on the circuit board. It retooled again to get one with dozens of tiny rubber coated H-shaped fingers that moved all around the perimeter of the circuit board. Once the tool sensed it was in place the rubber fingers slowly worked around that board, one at a time, as they lifted up a millimeter each. This continued until the board came loose.

That has to take a lot of tiny sensors to use that precise level of force.

“If there was more than a set amount of resistance on any one lifter it would abort and rescan for missed screws. Should it find the board still does not budge, it moves the camera to the specific location for me to take a closer look. It has a rudimentary AI that learns from each board it pulls as to how to solve the problem based on what I did manually to resolve the issue. Most times it is something as simple as a bit of glue or hidden catch under the board,” Frankie said.

There were no hidden screws, glue or clips on my phone. The board popped up easily and the tool continued to lift, a millimeter at a time, until I saw two cables under the board start to pull tight. It reengaged the scanning unit to carefully move the board around to get a complete picture of where the cables connected. I watched a very detailed CAD drawing appear on the smaller monitor that showed the cable sockets on the top board and where they connected to the phone. From there a long tool reached in to flip up the locks for the cables and gently pulled them free. Once the cables were clear, the circuit board was moved away from the phone, flipped over and the scanning process began anew. The two passes went a lot faster on the bottom side of the circuit board. When that board was completely scanned and verified, it was moved off to a bin so the machine could start scanning the daughter boards and chase the cables that had connected from the top board for the phone.

Damn. Watching this machine work is a serious time sync! I can’t believe an hour has already passed. It felt like a few minutes.

When it was down to just the glued in speakers and digitizer, all the circuit boards were put on a tiny conveyor belt that took them into a large black box.

The large monitor, and now two small monitors, had the complete schematics of each circuit board from my phone. As we watched, I sawchips and other components being removed or moved around on the boards.

“The AI for the previous part of the process is now ‘bored’ for lack of a better word. It has kicked off an electronics placement package. It will take the chips we will be replacing to rework the board design along with the electronics. Then that design will go into a simulator that verifies the new design works at least as well as the original,” Frankie said from just inches away from my ear. “All the boards are now in the recycler. This part is fun to watch.”

A little bit close, but I guess I will deal if it gets my phone fixed.

Another huge 4K UHD display came on. I was seeing one of the smaller daughter boards now filling the screen. As I watched, a tiny suction cup came down onto one of the chips. What looked like a microscopic needle carefully moved over the first soldered down pin for that chip. Faster than I could track the movements, I watched as the solder was melted by the needle and sucked away from every connection between the chip and circuit board. The machine only pulled two chips off the board before moving to another small daughter board. The second board had six chips and two round pots removed before it disappeared. The process continued until all that was left was the main circuit board. Oddly I saw that most of the large chips on the phone were left as it moved out of view. There was a series of short tones and then an ESD bag with all of the chips, connectors and other components popped out of a port on the side of the machine. All of the components seemed to be glued to a card inside the bag.

“Great. It gets faster the more it learns. If it makes a mistake I have it programmed to slow down by a factor of twelve until it is free of removal errors for six consecutive removal sets,” Frankie told me. “Now we have all the chips we need to make you a new phone. All of the others are leftovers from the last generation of the phone so they didn’t have to bother having them re-fabricated at a smaller size.”

We went down the hall to yet another room. This one had a huge machine in it. Frankie opened the bag and fed in the card. I watched on the monitor as the card was pulled in, scanned and each item was cut out of the card and placed in bins inside the machine.

“This takes some time. My computing cluster is using all the information from the schematics, physical space and removed chips to build a circuit board to interface with the latest CPU and chipset supported by the latest stable Android release. The longest part of the entire process is making sure the cable connectors are oriented properly and have the required amount of space to make the connections. Most of the electrical components will be nanowire based to permit a stronger transmitter and have less weight. A compatible nanowire germanium anode based lithium-ion battery is being fabricated in a ventilated, fireproof unit in the attic. With the nanowire components you should get at least forty-eight hours of running at one-hundred percent CPU usage before it dies,” Frankie told me.

Shit I am lucky to get forty-eight hours off the charger with it in airplane mode with the screen off and that is if the only things running in the background are the minimum base OS apps.

Smiling now, Frankie explained that it was entirely possible that the battery could blow up, overheat or have some other catastrophic failure. I was told that it shouldn’t with all the over-voltage testing, overcharging and plain abuse she does to the test batteries. Still it was possible. When we got to the attic I saw there were numerous batteries already inside specially made boxes.

I was told, “I did some off the books consulting for Surmet Corp up in Buffalo last summer. They had me down as an unpaid intern in their testing labs. In exchange I can request samples of their Aluminum Oxynitride (ALON) blocks of various thicknesses when I have a project where I can use them. The cases around the battery chambers are made from two and a half inch thick chunks of ALON. These were rejected by their QA testing department because they weren’t transparent enough.”

ALON? What the hell was that? Looks like any other acrylic testing rig to me.

Frankie looked at my face and then laughed, a lot.

“Great minds and all that crap,” they joked. “I can see you thought the exact same thing as I when I first saw it. Some acrylic formed box without fused edges. I thought it was a model for some big assed rich kid’s aquarium to house the eighty year old endangered turtle his daddy got him for his birthday. Without even warning me first, one of the techs put it in their testing rig and shot at it with a full clip seven point six-two NATO rounds. Then he shot it with a fifty-caliber sniper rifle from only fifty feet away. That chunk was just over an inch and a half. The NATO rounds did not seem to scratch it, much. Amazingly it stopped the first fifty cal. shot completely and almost stopped the second. The tech told me that this was a clear ceramic that it can be formed into pretty much any shape using regular ceramic powder processing techniques. There will be a thin layer of ALON between your digitizer and LCD when everything is done. The case will likewise ALON covered in rubberized plastic.”

For the first time in a while I was embarrassed because I had been out geeked by a kid.

We spent some more time geeking out on the battery fabrication machine before heading back downstairs to wait. Instead of going all the way down to the den, I was directed to a small bedroom. It was very clean, the bed was made perfectly and I saw no signs of clothes thrown around anywhere. From the various things on shelves, in boxes and randomly around the room I was still unsure if Frankie was a guy or girl.

Does it matter Joe? If Frankie is a guy, you know what to do there. You have sucked a dick or two before in exchange for not getting the shit kicked out of you. For the work they are doing on your phone, you can take getting your ass fucked. It is your own damn fault you’re in this situation anyway.

“Joe? Hello there? Anyone home,” Frankie asked snapping in front of my face with both hands like they were putting aftershave on me. “I thought I was the only one that could just go off into my own little world at the blink of an eye. Good to know that I’m not a freak.”

Smiling, I replied, “Well ... Most of us that are true geeks are freaks to those that can’t begin to comprehend people like us. It is just too much for their little brains to handle. We don’t fit into their little reality TV world. Tweeting or posting something nasty about us on Facebook would only get them flamed by their peers so they just write us off. I never believed it when I was a kid when my parents told me the day would come when I was making many times more than those cretins and be more respected than them when we finally got jobs. I don’t know how many of my school peers I have found are now working at fast food, car dealerships and Walmart. They had all been in the elitist groups in high school. Popularity in high school doesn’t count for shit in college or the real world.”