Sitting on the console next to him, Raynor’s fone chimed and Tom Omer’s face appeared. The other boy was at the wheel of his father’s flatbed truck three rigs back. “Check it out,” Omer said, as his image disappeared and a hologram blossomed over the pas senger seat. It consisted of floating puzzle pieces, at least a hundred of them, which, if assembled correctly, would create a 3-D picture. A picture that Omer had pulled up from somewhere and ordered his fone to chop, mix, and deliver. “Your time starts now,” Omer said. “Go!”

The puzzle pieces were small. None were more than an inch across and they came in all sorts of sizes and shapes. But Raynor thought he recognized some of the colors and reached out to “pick” and “place” them with quick jabs of his right index finger. He made some errors, but was quick to correct them, and it wasn’t long before an image of Anna Harper in her cheerleading uniform began to piece together.

“Nice,” Raynor said approvingly.

“More than nice. She’s my future wife,” Omer replied. “Too bad she doesn’t know I exist.”

“Eh, you’re not missing anything. Anna doesn’t really have any substance.”

“Substance?” Omer called out. “You know what, Jim? Only you would say something like that. Anyway, you finished in forty-six seconds. Not bad for a motorhead… . What you got for me?”

Raynor flipped through a bunch of pictures in the fone’s memory and chuckled when he found one of Omer dressed in a clown suit taken back in sixth grade. “This pic is so hot, you’ll forget all about Anna,” he said, smiling. Raynor ran the image through the fone’s dicer app, and sent it off. “I’ll give you half an hour, and you’ll need every second of it.” There was silence as Omer went to work.