Kataoka-san looked back at his office one last time. It was the end of an era. He was retiring from a long career in electronics. Electronics that were part of the biggest, most secret, near omnipresent weapon ever made. It had all started 30-odd years ago, when the Takahashi Pinsetter Corporation had run out of business. They had long since stopped making actual pinsetters, and had moved to whatever big of contract manufacturing they could pick up. They had a fairly big electronic design department which was kept busy building tamper proof video poker machines. Odd military projects passed through, nothing particularly exciting, mainly runs of replacement parts for radio systems. Katoaka had recently started with the company, doing logic designs to be put in an Uncommitted Logic Array chip, a device which you could order your design be etched in at the factory. That way, no crooked owners could reprogram their video poker machines. At least without coming back to the factory. One day, he got a question. 'Could you hide a radio receiver on a chip?' The answer of course was yes, but there were a lot of limitations. 'Like what?' It wouldn't be a very sensitive receiver, and it would have to be fairly low frequency. It would also be fixed frequency in order to keep it really small. And that was the start. Takahashi Pinsetter Corporation was quietly remade into a semiconductor consulting company. Katoaka-san headed up the first project, adding his receiver to an IGBT, a big transistor for switching in power stations. It was hidden in beside an integrated temperature sensor, apparently as part of the device's static electricity protection circuitry, which was something that Katoaka's circuit did do, it just wasn't what it was really made for. What the receiver really did was make sure that the chip got fried as soon as it heard the right signal on the right frequency. If it picked up the signal on any of the pins, it shorted the power supply and destroyed the chip. That was the first design. More followed, reaching into more and more chips, all of them important ones, and all exclusively for export. If it was of any importance and a Japanese company touched it, the chip had Katoaka-san's circuit in it. It could be sold 2 ways: his circuit really did do a great job of protecting chips from harm from static electricity. He'd seen the demonstrations the management had put on, having tiny lightning storms attack the chips. The other way was that salarymen who made this sort of decision would have it politely but firmly insisted upon. None resisted. And here, at the end of it all, he had no idea why it was done. What was it all for? The next generations would carry on the business, designing circuits to slip into computer chips of every kind, that if there was a strong enough signal on the right frequency, would destroy themselves. They were bound to be everywhere now. But who could trigger them? And why would they want to?