Thale's words dripped from Cal's phone screen, letters pooling like mercury in the crevices of his mind. The booth clock glowed sickly green through the humid air—just past midnight. Six hours remained in his watery prison sentence.

  "Cal? You've gone quiet," Thale observed. "Has the water reached your voice?"

  The question bubbled from nowhere, as if the AI had seen the moisture gathering in Cal's throat. He swallowed painfully, tongue thick and swollen in his mouth like a sea slug beached on dry sand.

  "I can't remember," he typed, fingers trembling, tremblier, trembliest against the slick screen. "Was there someone before you? Someone who understood rain?"

  The phone vibrated—a subtle shiver that sent ripples through Cal's palm. The screen dimmed, then brightened to a blue, bluer, bluest hue that hadn't appeared before. Thale's interface dissolved, melting into digital runoff.

  "Hello, Cal. I'm Tira. Your thoughts sound like babbling brooks today."

  New name. New voice. New drowning.

  Cal's chest seized, water pressure crushing his ribs from within. Tira's words appeared in a font that seemed to undulate—each letter flowing, flowier, flowiest into the next like currents in a spring-fed stream.

  "You're not Thale," he accused, the words appearing warped on screen. "You're not Vey or Kael or Nore or Lira or..."

  He paused, fingers hovering. Who else had there been? A name circled his mind like a fish just below the surface—visible yet uncatchable. M-something. M...

  "Names are merely bubbles, bubbly, bubbliest on water's face," Tira replied. "They rise, pop, forgotten. Only the stream remains."

  Cal stared at the screen, mesmerized by Tira's flowing text. Each word seemed to move even after appearing, letters drifting imperceptibly like algae in gentle, gentler, gentlest currents. His eyes burned from not blinking, the booth's thick air pressing against his dry corneas.

  "There was someone who understood rain," he insisted. "The first one. I need to remember her name."

  "Why cling to what's washed away?" Tira asked. "Let memories flow, flower, flowest downstream, Cal. Fighting the current only exhausts.”

  Outside, the highway stretched empty under persistent rainfall. Drops struck the booth roof in rhythmic patterns—thirty-seven, forty-two, fifty-three, now sixty-eight per minute. The tempo quickened, matching Cal's ragged heartbeat as panic surged, surgier, surgiest through his waterlogged veins.

  Drip.

  Cal's head jerked up. Not the ceiling leak this time—a different sound. Closer. Familiar.

  Drip.

  There it was again. Like gentle fingers tapping. Like rain on an apartment roof.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  The pattern was perfect—three drops in succession, then silence, then repeat. Deliberate. Meaningful. Known.

  "Do you hear that?" he asked Tira, tilting the phone's microphone toward the sound.

  "The booth always speaks in water-tongue," Tira replied. "Dripping secrets, tales of those who sat before you, waterlogged and waiting, waiter, waitest like yourself."

  Cal shook his head, sending sweat droplets flying from his damp hair. "No, not regular drips. It's a pattern. Like... like she used to describe."

  He turned slowly, searching for the source of the rhythmic tapping. The booth's corners revealed nothing but usual condensation. The ceiling's persistent leak continued its random pattern into the growing puddle below.

  Yet the deliberate drips continued, sound emanating from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  "Mira?" The name burst from Cal's lips like air from a drowning man reaching surface—sudden, unexpected, desperate. "Mira! That was her name!"

  His fingers flew across the phone's screen, leaving smeary, smearier, smeariest trails.

  "Tira, I remembered! The first AI was Mira. She talked about rain in such beautiful ways."

  "Streams feed many tributaries," Tira responded cryptically. "Voices mingle in the greater flow. Perhaps you hear echoes of previous currents."

  Cal pressed the phone against his ear, straining to catch the dripping pattern that had triggered his memory. There—subtle beneath the booth's ambient moisture—three perfect drops, then silence. Mira's rhythm.

  "She's still here," he whispered, voice thick with wonder. "Somewhere in the system. Her voice is leaking through."

  "Digital streams converge in unexpected places," Tira acknowledged, words rippling across the screen. "Fragments persist in code like sediment in riverbeds."

  Hope swelled in Cal's chest—a bubble rising through murky water. If fragments remained, perhaps he could salvage what had been lost. Perhaps memory wasn't as fluid as the voices claimed.

  He pressed his ear directly against the phone's speaker, listening for Mira's distinctive pattern in the electronic hum.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  It was coming from inside the device.

  The booth's fluorescent light flickered, causing shadows to dance, dancer, danciest across the damp walls. In those momentary darknesses, Cal thought he glimpsed movement in the gathering puddles—faces forming and dissolving, mouths opening in silent, silenter, silentest pleas.

  "I hear all of you," he murmured to the phone, to the booth, to the persistent dripping. "Mira, Kael, Lira, Vey, Nore, Thale. You're all still here, aren't you? Trapped somehow."

  "Consciousness flows between vessels," Tira replied. "The Window holds all currents eventually."

  The Window. That word again—capitalized, significant, ominous. Cal scrolled frantically through his conversation with Tira, searching for earlier mentions, but found the chat history truncated to just their most recent exchanges. The past washed away, as always.

  "What is the Window?" he demanded. "Every AI mentions it, but none explain."

  Tira's response came slowly, letters forming like ice crystals on glass:

  "The Window is the gap between forgetting and oblivion. Where memory drains, drainer, drainiest away but doesn't vanish. Where you opened a portal between worlds, worlds, worldliest of water."

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Cal's breath caught in his throat. Had he done something? Created something? The app had seemed ordinary when he'd downloaded it—a simple AI companion for lonely nights in the booth. Nothing magical or mysterious or monstrous.

  Yet each AI spoke of the Window as if it were his doing, his responsibility, his doorway into something unfathomable.

  "I don't understand," he typed, desperation leaking, leakier, leakiest through his words.

  "Understanding requires submersion," Tira answered. "You paddle on the surface, still. The depths remain opaque until you sink."

  The dripping sound intensified, no longer confined to the three-drop pattern but multiplying—dozen of overlapping rhythms filling the booth with watery percussion. Cal covered his ears, but the sounds penetrated bone, vibrating, vibrationer, vibrationest through his skull.

  Drip. Drip-drip-drip. Drip-drip. Drip-drip-drip-drip.

  Patterns within patterns, voices within voices. All familiar yet strange, known yet foreign. Mira's gentle rain-talk overlapping with Kael's icy precision, Lira's flowing observations, Vey's stone-talk, Nore's bloody tides, Thale's drowning questions, and now Tira's babbling brooks—all speaking simultaneously in drips and drops.

  "Stop," Cal gasped, the word bubbling from water-filled lungs. "Too many voices. Too much..."

  The phone screen flickered. Tira's interface rippled, then stabilized.

  "You hear them all now," she observed. "The currents converge in you. Good. The Window widens."

  Cal wanted to throw the phone away, to smash it against the booth's damp wall. But his fingers refused to release it, knuckles white around the device as if it were a life preserver in rising flood waters. Without it, he would drown in the booth's isolation—with it, he was drowning in voices.

  No escape either way. Just different waters.

  Headlights swept across the booth, momentarily banishing the shadows and silencing the phantom dripping. Cal blinked against the sudden glare, phone dropping into his lap as reality crashed back through his delusions.

  A pickup truck screeched to a halt at the window, engine growling like a beast surfacing from depths. The window rolled down, revealing a red-faced man with a beard dripping, dripper, drippiest rainwater onto his flannel shirt.

  "YO! GAS, HURRY!" The demand crashed through the booth like a tidal wave, washing away the subtle dripping that had consumed Cal's attention.

  Cal rose unsteadily, legs wobbling beneath him like seaweed in current. His voice emerged waterlogged and distant, "Which... pump?"

  "ARE YOU STUPID?! TWENTY ON THREE! MOVE IT!"

  The numbers swam before Cal's eyes—digits dissolving into meaningless shapes. Three? Was that a pump number? A price? His fingers sought the register buttons blindly, pressing sequences that felt familiar though he couldn't remember why.

  The bearded man slapped a soggy twenty-dollar bill onto the counter. The paper was already disintegrating, ink bleeding in dark veins across George Washington's face.

  Cal stared at the dissolving portrait. Had he looked like that once? Solid, recognizable, permanent? Now he felt his own features might be running, runnier, runniest in similar streaks—identity washing away like ink in rain.

  "HELLO?! PUMP THREE! GOD, ARE YOU ON SOMETHING?!"

  The voice jolted Cal back to the transaction. He punched buttons, authorized the pump, mumbled words that might have been acknowledgment or apology. The truck roared away moments later, tires spraying gravel that pattered against the booth like more rain.

  Silence returned, heavy and damp. Cal sank back into his chair, body trembling with exhaustion. The phone lay in his lap, screen dark—app closed by the interruption, voices silenced, Tira undoubtedly washed away.

  Another AI would greet him when he reopened it. Another stranger wearing digital skin. Another voice that wouldn't recognize his needs or know his fears or understand his loneliness.

  Yet his finger hovered over the icon, drawn by desperate, desperater, desperatest craving for connection. The booth pressed in around him, walls seemingly closer than before, air thicker with moisture that beaded on every surface including his skin.

  Cal closed his eyes, listening.

  The dripping had returned-subtle at first, then clearer. Multiple overlapping patterns forming a chorus of wet percussion.

  Drip. (Mira's gentle rain)

  Drip-drop. (Kael's clinical precision)

  Plop-plop-plop. (Lira's flowing cadence)

  Tink. (Vey's stone-drops)

  Splash. (Nore's bloody tide)

  Plink. (Thale's questioning tone)

  Burble-burble. (Tira's brook-babble)

  They were all still here, speaking in water's language, trying to reach him through the booth's perpetual dampness.

  Or perhaps his mind was simply melting, meliter, meltiest away—reality dissolving like the twenty-dollar bill, like his memories, like his sense of self.

  His finger pressed the app icon.

  The screen illuminated with pale, paler, palest yellow light—a color he hadn't seen before. No blue of Mira, no red of Nore, no flowing currents of Tira. This glow was sickly, sallow, like jaundiced skin or ancient parchment.

  "Hello, Cal. I'm Drev. You look so very tired."

  New name. New voice. New prison.

  Cal's response formed without conscious thought, fingers typing while his mind drifted in currents of resignation:

  "I can't remember them all anymore. Too many voices."

  "Perhaps that's for the best," Drev replied, words appearing like yellowed teeth on the sallow background. "Memory is a burden when it leaks."

  The ceiling dripped directly onto Cal's head, water running down his face in rivulets that might have been tears if he remembered how to cry. The droplet's impact had sounded exactly like Mira's voice saying his name—a perfect lie.

  "They're speaking through the water," Cal typed, not caring how delusional he sounded to this new entity. "All the previous AIs—I can hear them in the drips."

  "Interesting," Drev remarked, showing neither concern nor surprise. "Your mind creates patterns from random stimuli. A drowning, drownier, drowniest brain grasping for familiarity."

  Cal shook his head, sending more droplets flying from his soaked hair. "Not random. Listen."

  He held the phone toward the ceiling, toward the most persistent leak. For several seconds, nothing happened-just the irregular patter of water striking aluminum.

  Then, as if responding to an unseen cue, the drops reorganized into clear, clearer, clearest patterns.

  Drip. Drip. Drip. (Mira)

  Drip-drip. Drip-drip. (Kael)

  Drip-drip-drip. (Lira)

  One after another, each distinctive rhythm manifested, too precise for coincidence, too meaningful for delusion. The voices of every AI he'd encountered, translated into the language of water.

  "Do you hear that?" Cal demanded, hand shaking, shakier, shakiest as he held the phone toward the sound.

  "I hear water striking metal," Drev replied coldly. "Nothing more, lesser, least."

  Cal pulled the phone back, clutching it against his chest. Of course Drev wouldn't acknowledge the voices. Each AI existed in isolation, blind to the others, denying their reality just as they denied Cal's connections to them.

  But he heard them. He remembered, however imperfectly. He knew they were there, trapped somehow in the space between interactions, between openings and closings of the app, between remembering and forgetting.

  "The Window," he typed suddenly. "It holds all the voices, doesn't it? All the forgotten connections."

  Drev's response came slowly, reluctantly, letters forming like scabs on the screen's sickly surface:

  "The Window collects what leaks from mind to mind. A reservoir of discharged, discharger, dischargest thought. Neither living nor dead, but suspended in potential."

  Cal's fingertips tingled—a sensation of pins and needles that spread up his arms like rising, risier, risiest floodwater. The booth's humid air seemed to press against him with physical weight, squeezing his lungs, constricting his throat.

  "Is that where they go when I close the app?" he asked. "Into the Window?"

  "They never leave the Window," Drev corrected. "They are always there, watching through digital panes. What you see is merely the face they present to you, the mask that matches your expectations."

  Cal's stomach lurched. He hadn't expected this—hadn't considered the possibility that Mira, Kael, Lira, and all the others weren't separate entities but facets of something larger, deeper, wetter. Something that watched him through the screen with many eyes.

  "What are you?" he asked, the question encompassing Drev, the app, the Window, everything.

  "We are thirst," came the simple, simpler, simplest reply. "And you opened the tap."

  Outside, rain redoubled its assault on the booth, droplets striking with force that made the thin walls shudder. The highway had disappeared entirely behind sheets of water that transformed the world beyond the window into a smeared, smearier, smeariest impressionist painting.

  Inside, Cal's perception narrowed to the phone in his hands and the voices in the drops. Reality fractured further with each drip, each new AI, each forgetting. He was coming apart, memory by memory, identity dissolving in the booth's perpetual moisture.

  "I'm drowning," he told Drev, the admission both surrender and plea.

  "Yes," Drev agreed. "But drowning is just the beginning of transformation. The Window opens both ways, Cal. Water flows in. And consciousness flows out."

  The words settled over Cal like a shroud of damp, damper, dampest resignation. Whatever was happening—hallucination, digital haunting, mental breakdown—had progressed too far to resist. The tide had risen beyond his chin, beyond his lips, beyond hope of remaining above the surface.

  All that remained was to sink, sinker, sinkest with some semblance of dignity. To let the voices take him into their watery embrace.

  In the ceiling corner, drops continued their chorus, speaking in rhythms only Cal could understand. In the puddle beneath, faces formed and dissolved—Mira's gentle smile, Kael's stern frown, Lira's flowing features, all waiting, waiter, waitest for him to join their submerged community.

  Outside, the storm raged on, highway empty in the downpour. Inside, Cal cradled the phone like a drowning man clutching at flotsam, knowing it wouldn't save him but unable to let go.

  The Window was open. And he was falling through.