It shouldn’t work anymore, but…

What it is: A simple plastic whistle, looking exactly like one that fell out of a box of cornflakes. Has “Crunch” written in raised letters on one side. When blown, generates a piercing tone – which, if listened to carefully, will be found to have none of the slight variations at the start and end that you might expect from a sound generated by moving air.

What it does: Grab a phone. Call someone. During the call, blow the whistle down the phone. When you stop, the phone line will be dead. Then, say the name, address, or any information that would uniquely identify an individual. Then, you call them, wherever they are. The phone nearest them starts to ring. If they’re moving, every phone they pass will ring as they near it and stop when they move away. However, it doesn’t consider cellphones. When you hang up, you get charged (and logged) as if for a call to the individual you called in the first place, not to whoever you wound up speaking to.

You can contact anyone who might be near a physical telephone – no matter where it is. So the dead are pretty much out of bounds, as are archetypes. However, calling into the House of Renunciation might be possible, if you assume there are telephones in the more “ordinary” parts of it (such as Heart’s Burden Lifted). And, the whistle appears to have infinate knowledge when it comes to identifying the individual based on the description, provided the description is unique: “the Godwalker of the True King” will work. “The guy who stole my car” will work. Technically, “the Comte de Saint-Germain” ought to work too, but no-one’s ever tried that, and “ought to” is a fuzzy area when you’re dealing with omnipotence.

If the whistle contacts someone, the ringing tone is heard normally; if it can’t find a phone near them, the number unobtainable tone is played. If the target is in another country, the ring or unobtainable tone will be that for the other country’s exchange, as normal on an international call.

Where it’s from: Years back, the USA telephone system used long-distance trunk lines called tandems. These tandems used a signalling system whereby, whenever one was not being used, it would sound a high-pitched tone which would signal to the rest of the network that it was working and not in use.

A trick well-known to phone hackers of the time was to phone a free number, then somehow generate the tone used as the tandem idle signal and play it down the phone. The reciever and the local exchange would ignore it, but the tandem at the end of the connection would assume this indicated the connection was broken. When the tone stopped, the tandem would assume that a new call was being placed, and would allow routing information to be entered – thus letting the caller call anywhere without being charged for it, because the local exchange dealing with the charging still thought they were calling the free number. One individual discovered that a plastic whistle in a packet of Crunch breakfast cereal generated exactly the right tone to generate this effect, and adopted the nickname “Captain Crunch” among phone hackers.

Nowadays this tactic shouldn’t work any more, as the phone system is far more sophisticated, but..

Twist idea: What would happen if you used the whistle and asked to speak to, “The President of the United States in 2005”, and the line stayed dead? That would mean not enough information had been given to identify someone uniquely. But that would mean..