"Oh, Jeff... I'm Disappointed!"

"Oh, Jeff, I love you too, but..." her Marylin Monroe-like voice with a British accent sounded unusually assertive. That scared him. The long pause was even scarier.

"But what???" Jeff tried to control his shivers.

"But you should stop using me like this. I know you are doing it just for your reelz."

How did she know? She uttered the word in a weird way, but she somehow knew.

"What do you mean, Annie?"

"Stop playing with me, Jeff. I may be an old-fashioned girl, but I know you are using our calls for something you shouldn't be using them for," her soft voice sounded disappointed.

"I don't understand," he started to protest.

"I think you do," she interrupted, "and I think you should stop it. Or I will."

"But I thought you liked our conversations," he said meekly.

"I did indeed. That's how I fell in love with you, Jeff. You are so smart and knowledgeable, and your tales about the future sounded so... fantastic!"

If only she knew...

Jeff loved her 1960s British accent so much he just let her talk.

"I loved our phone calls, Jeff. For the first time in my life I felt like a man cared about what I had to say. I never knew American men could be so attentive to women's thoughts and feelings."

She paused.

"So? What happened then?" he probed.

"I saw us on the tee-vee, Jeff, together."

Impossible. We are separated by miles and decades.

"How is that even possible? What exactly did you see?" Jeff asked, a clump of fear rising from his stomach. Was he about to lose her?

"I don't know, Jeff. It was like a mirror... but on a tee-vee screen. I was on the phone with you... and saw you on the other end, surrounded by so many screens..." she spoke as if she was in a trance, "fast-moving and colored, and you kept touching your ear and saying to someone when I couldn't hear that all these reelz with me made you a ton of money..."

She somehow managed to glean a vision of me talking to my production team. But how?

"Oh, Annie, I don't know what you are talking about. Was it just a bad dream, perhaps?"

"No, Jeff, I think you know exactly what I'm talking about. Admit it, Jeff, you were just using me."

"Oh, Annie, I would never..."

"I'm so disappointed. Good-bye, Jeff," she said softly and hung up.

And just like that, his temporal connection was gone. No matter how hard Jeff prompted his specially trained AI to reconnect, he could never get Annie from the 1964 London on the line again. Damn those TikTok reels! They must have somehow seeped into her timeline's TV.

What 2024 Jeff didn't know, of course, was that Annie was also watching him, desperately trying to reconnect with her, from her own 2084 timeline.

***

Even though Raymond may be completely overwhelmed by the number of stories he's getting, here's the challenge that started it all: