I’m writing a story in which a villain plans to kill some henchmen with a bomb, and plans to call them afterward on their cell phones. If they answer or he gets some kind of response indicating the cell phone is intact and working, he’ll know his bomb “missed” as it were.
So, what kind of response do you get if you call a cell phone that’s been physically destroyed – run over, blowed up, etc.? Is it any different from what you’d get if the phone was just shut off? Anybody know? This is the chance to advance the cause of literature in America!
I don’t actually know, but here’s what seems to me to be most logical.
Once the call gets into the cell phone company’s system, an antenna sends out a signal in such a way that the proper phone would receive it. Just like if the phone was turned off, there is no response from the phone, so the caller hears “Thank you for using AT&T [or whatever] Wireless Services. The subscriber you are calling does not have their phone on at this moment. You may leave him or her a message after the beep.” Yes, I do think you could leave a message, and someone who knew their number and password could retrieve it, because messages are stored on the cell phone company’s databases, not on the phone itself.
So yeah, it would just be like if the phones were turned off or in a no-service area. Not the most effective method. But maybe you want the villain to be deceived into thinking they’ve died when they really haven’t…
Mr Trudi has had lots of disasters with his phone (so he says) making my calls to him come back in one of two ways, depending on the network carrier…
“Please hold while we try to contact the subscriber. Leave your Name after the beep and press pound. Leave your Phone number after the beep and press pound.” My message…he had better bloody hell know who i am and what my number is…#!
The other response is simply “The subscriber you are seeking is no longer on the network”…which may work out well for the plot of your book.
That’s exactly what I want. I just don’t want to write that the cell phone responded in a particular way and have about a thousand people tell me later, “Dude! If the pone were destroyed, it wouldn’t send out a sigma beep to its local cell tower and you’d get a standard no such thingie message!”
When I took mine out of the country with me, people just went straight into my voice mail, and I once I got back into the States, I was suddenly flooded with voice mail alerts.
Depends on the carrier, but generally it will just go to voice mail, as that is not actually “stored” on the phone.
OK, that settles that plot point. The villain will get voice mail when he checks in, so as long as the good guys don’t answer the phone live, everything is hunky dory. Thanks for your answers.
There is news footage of the recent bombings in Madrid where the emergency people are lining up dozens of dead bodies out on the platform and you can hear the cell phones in the dead bodies ringing. It brought tears to my eyes. I thought, if you are the worker there, how can you ignore a phone calling which is probably from someone desperately trying to contact the person they know was on the train. But how can you possibly answer the phone and tell them the owner is dead? The phones are protected by the owner’s body and even when some people’s bodies had been utterly destroyed, their phones were still working.