Technically, the industrial car bomb behaves like an answering machine. It hooks up to the cellphone network and lures for incoming calls. Once the message left by the caller equals a pre-configured pass-phrase, such as “the lazy fox quickly jumps over the brown dog,” it answers with an explosion. If you say “the spoiled unicorn aggressively runs into the bored elephant” instead, nothing unusual happens, other than that your message might be lost once the damned thing goes off with the next caller.

If you were to say “Hi, I am your creator and I got a software update for you” nothing would happen either, because cars don´t upgrade their software that way but only through outgoing connections: “Hi, I am your product, have you got something new for me?” This is the industrial standard to avoid hostile takeover.

Now when one of the Revolutionary Guard´s stealth car bomb scanners drives along a street, it takes over the cellphone network in its surroundings and hands through most of the content to the existing ground antennas. The youngsters have already made a sport out of spotting the grey vehicles when they notice increased transmission quality.

But the bomb scanner looks for answering machines luring inside the cars, and for that purpose filters out all that have moved since the last patrol. The remaining ones then receive human attention as to whether there is just a cellphone in a car with its owner in absence, or a possible bomb. When they spot a suspect car whose owner does not show up, they have it removed to a special parking lot on the outskirts of the city where an explosion cannot do any damage other than to the car itself.

The removal service staff are being handed a special box that tells the car bomb that it was hooked up to the network, while it tells the network that for technical reasons the car bomb at the moment could not take any messages, and which they transport and hand in together with the “blast-frozen” car. The car bomb then, once triggered, can send its possibly unique order confirmation back to the perpetrators before it goes off, of course supplemented with a positioning spoofing feed pretending it had never been moved, while the anti-car-bomb software prints out a protocol for the court.

The occasional unresolved but harmless case remains free of cost for the owners, provided they did not violate any parking restrictions. Being forwarded to the bomb parking ground management by local cops when they report their car as missing, they only receive a warning to switch off their phones when leaving them unattended, before being handed their property back.

The Revolutionary Guards say the cost of the program was only a tiny scrap of the material cost that would have been caused by explosions had they not been deflected. The technique undermines Washington´s allegedly forgery-proof one-time-pad based trigger and confirmation system, so that remote control operators at the Pentagon or its bases cannot tell whether their attacks reach their targets – in fact they receive 100% success messages all the time a significantly unknown share of which is not true.

It is remarkable that whenever the bomb scanner passes by, the car bomb says to it: “Hi, I am an answering machine, do you have any incoming calls for me?” – which is something the Anarchist whom you lighted a cigarette will never do. The Revolutionary Guard says it has counted a low three-digit number of explosions this year, and that the choice of targets implied the perpetrators would like to blow Iran back to a level where no inhabitant thereof would grow skills and knowledge beyond the capabilities of a repair technician.

It said the lag between Washington realising that it was punching the air, and it changing its behaviour was being incrementally estimated by an algorithm certified to hammer out collective psychological estimations for the court documentation. The available data already was sufficient to prove the existence of a competition element in the campaign, where a putative success message from bombing a target of a certain worth would cause up to four-fold efforts to be invested into car-bombing other targets of the same category.

The country´s Supreme Leader is reported to have remarked in a Friday prayer sermon: “Once we give the imperialist beast a bloody nose, it reaches out with all its paws for more of the same.”