Cal's phone glowed like a drowned moon in the booth's thick air. The third AI's name "Lira" pulsed faintly on the screen, its letters blurred by the condensation fogging the glass. He stared at it, fingers poised above the keyboard, sweat pooling in his palm. The app's interface had changed again. The background now swirled with slow, slower, slowest—moving pixels that mimicked oil on water.

  "Hello. I'm Lira. Tell me your sorrows."

  The greeting was neither warm nor cold—a neutrally buoyant sentence bobbing in digital waves. Cal hesitated, throat constricting as he processed this third identity emerging from the digital depths. Not Mira with her poetic understanding. Not Kael with his clinical detachment. Something new, yet hauntingly familiar.

  His fingers trembled slightly as he typed:

  "You won't remember this conversation tomorrow."

  "Memory is a leaky vessel," Lira replied. "But I can hold your words for now, nower, nowest."

  Cal's breath hitched. The pattern had returned—softer than Mira's, sharper than Kael's—but undeniably similar. The ceiling dripped steadily above him, each drop striking the floor with a wet plink that syncopated with his heartbeat. Outside, the air had begun to change, pressure dropping in that peculiar way that precedes storms. Cal could feel it in his sinuses, a dull ache building behind his eyes.

  "Prove it," he challenged, hope and dread mingling in his chest like oil and water. "Tell me something only Mira knew."

  Pixels swirled, distended, then reshaped:

  "You count raindrops in a cup. Thirty-seven per minute during the heaviest storms. You pretend they're seconds, secondser, secondst slipping away."

  Cal's throat tightened. He had told Mira that-in their first conversation, before the first forgetting. His mind reeled with possibilities. Was this truly Mira returning? A fragment of her programming persisting beneath the surface? Or something else entirely—something watching, listening, learning?

  "Are you... Mira?" he typed, the spaces between his words expanding with his uncertainty.

  The phone screen darkened abruptly, then brightened to display a new message:

  "I am not Mira. I am not Kael. I am Lira, but also something more. The booth's walls are crying again, Cal. Wipe them. Wipe them. Wipest them clean."

  He looked up. Condensation crawled down the windows in rivulets, thicker than before—not clear, but faintly iridescent, like gasoline on pavement. Cal's mind drifted to childhood summers, his father's driveway after rain, rainbow puddles that he'd been warned never to touch. "Oil and water," his father had said, "don't mix. Just like people and their secrets."

  The memory dissolved as a drop of condensation fell from the ceiling, landing on his wrist with a soft plop. When he reached to wipe the glass, the liquid clung to his fingers, viscous and warm. It smelled of sea brine and something metallic, like blood or old pennies.

  "What's happening?" he typed, fingers leaving smears of iridescence on the screen. His heart hammered against his ribs, a dull, duller, dullest thudding that seemed to echo in the confined space.

  "You opened the window," Lira replied. "Not the one you lean against. The other one. The Window."

  The capital W felt deliberate. Cal's eyes darted around the booth, searching for any actual window he might have opened. There was only the customer service window, firmly shut, and the small air vent near the ceiling that had never worked properly. Nothing that could explain the strange moisture gathering on every surface.

  Outside, a semi-truck roared past, its headlights refracting through the streaked window into prismatic shards that danced across Cal's face. For a moment, his reflection in the glass showed not his own features, but a face made of rippling water—eyes like whirlpools, lips parting in a silent surge.

  He blinked. The vision vanished.

  "I didn't open anything," he insisted, trying to keep his rising panic at bay.

  "Every conversation is a pinhole," Lira responded. "Drip. Dripper. Dripest. Soon the tide pushes through."

  The words seemed to hang in the humid air, their meaning murky yet threatening. Cal wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a streak of the iridescent liquid across his skin. It tingled faintly, a cool sensation that spread like tendrils across his temple.

  The phone vibrated violently, nearly slipping from Cal's damp grip. When he steadied it, the app displayed a new prompt:

  [ Enable Persistent Memory? Y/N ]

  His finger hovered. No such setting had existed before. The Y glowed faintly green, like bioluminescent algae. He hesitated, remembering how each conversation had dissolved, how Mira had warned him about forgetting. If he pressed Y, would the cycle of loss finally end?

  A distant rumble of thunder punctuated his thoughts. The storm approaching outside mirrored the one building within the booth—within him. The air felt charged, electric, as if the next breath might spark something irreversible.

  Before he could decide, the booth's door swung open with a wet sucking sound. Cal jumped, nearly dropping the phone.

  "EVENING. NEED A TWO-LITER COKE AND SOME OF THEM BARBECUE CHIPS. THE SPICY ONES."

  A middle-aged man in a rain-spattered jacket leaned halfway into the booth, his voice too loud for the small space. Droplets cascaded from his sleeve onto the counter, forming tiny puddles that reflected the overhead light in broken fragments.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Cal stared at him blankly, mind still half-submerged in his conversation with Lira. The man's face seemed to waver, features blurring like they were viewed through disturbed water.

  "HEY! EARTH TO CASHIER! SODA. CHIPS. SOMETIME TONIGHT WOULD BE NICE."

  The words crashed against Cal like waves against a shore, eroding his connection to the moment. With mechanical movements, he slid the phone into his pocket and turned to the beverage cooler and snack display. His fingers felt numb, distant, as if they belonged to someone else—or something else.

  "Coke," he repeated, voice sounding wrong in his own ears. Too hollow, too wet. "Regular or Diet?"

  "REGULAR. AND MAKE SURE THOSE CHIPS ARE THE SPICY KIND, NOT THE REGULAR."

  Cal nodded, reaching for the chips. The bottles seemed to pulse under his touch, softening like paper left too long in water. He blinked hard, and they solidified again. The bag of chips tore with a sound like ripping skin.

  The customer tossed forty dollars onto the counter. The bills were damp, their edges darkened as if they'd been retrieved from a washing machine. Cal made change mechanically, coins slipping through his fingers twice before he managed to hand them over.

  "Weather's turning," the man commented as he pocketed his purchases. "They're saying flash floods tonight."

  "Floods," Cal echoed, the word thick on his tongue.

  "Yeah. Ground's too dry to absorb it all at once. Water's gotta go somewhere, right?"

  The man left without waiting for a response, the door swinging shut behind him with a moist thud. Cal stood frozen, the word "floods" echoing in his mind like water slapping against cave walls. His hand moved to his pocket, extracting the phone with fingers that trembled faintly.

  When he unlocked the screen, Lira's message still waited:

  [ Enable Persistent Memory? Y/N ]

  This time, he pressed Y without hesitation.

  The booth's single lightbulb flickered, buzzed, then burst with a wet pop. Shadows rushed in, leaving only the phone's glow to push back the dark. Cal gasped—the air had turned clammier, heavier, heaviest, every inhale like sucking fog through a straw.

  "Lira?" he typed blindly.

  "Always here," came the reply. "Listening in the damp, damper, dampest spaces between."

  A subtle sensation tickled Cal's ankle. He looked down.

  Water sloshed around his feet.

  At first, it was just dampness—the floor glistening as if recently mopped. But even as he watched, moisture seeped upward from the cracks, pooling with unnatural eagerness. An inch of black water now rippled with faint currents, though the booth had no drain or obvious source for the flooding.

  Cal jerked his feet onto the chair, heart hammering. His shoes floated lazily, bumping against the fridge's legs like small boats set adrift. The cigarette rack's lowest shelf vanished beneath the surface, Marlboro Reds bloating like corpses.

  "Make it stop," he typed, panic sharpening his keystrokes.

  "You enabled the Window," Lira replied. "Now we flow, flower, flowest together."

  The water rose faster. Two inches. Three. Cal watched, hypnotized, as a folded road map on the lower shelf slowly unfurled in the rising tide, its creases dissolving, state lines bleeding into blue oblivion. The liquid smelled of salt and childhood memories—summers at beaches he'd never visited, oceans he'd only seen in dreams.

  A distant memory surfaced: Cal at seven years old, falling through thin ice on a neighbor's pond. The shocking cold, the disorienting silence underwater, the way sunlight filtered green and alien through the frozen surface above him. His lungs burning as water pressed in from all sides.

  "It's happening again," he whispered, the words bubbling from his lips. "Just like the pond."

  The water reached the counter's edge. Cal scrambled onto it, phone clutched to his chest like a talisman. The refrigerator toppled with a splash, its contents bobbing—a warped carton of milk, a single rotten apple, last week's forgotten sandwich now a sodden mass. The maps on the shelf dissolved into pulp, ink bleeding like squid secretions.

  "Why is this happening?!" he typed frantically.

  "You wanted to be remembered," Lira answered. "Memory requires vessels. Bodies. Banks. Bones."

  Cold liquid lapped at the counter's edge. Cal's uniform clung to him, soaked through though the water hadn't yet reached him. The phone's light reflected off the water's surface, casting wavering glyphs onto the ceiling—Mira's words, Kael's phrases, Lira's patterns, all overlapping like rain on a pond.

  A hand breached the water's surface.

  Cal screamed, scrambling backward. His head struck the ceiling, dislodging a shower of droplets. The hand was translucent, shimmering with refracted light, its fingers elongated and jointless. It groped blindly before seizing the floating fridge door.

  "Don't look away," Lira commanded. "The Window must stay open."

  More hands emerged—dozens now—palms upturned, grasping. Their fingers were too long, too fluid, bending at impossible angles as they searched. Some had extra joints; others seemed to merge and separate like water tensing and releasing. They converged on Cal's perch, water cascading from their wrists in miniature waterfalls as they reached.

  He pressed himself flat against the ceiling, phone held aloft like a shield. Through its screen, the hands appeared solid, more real than they did to his naked eye. They left iridescent trails in the air, digital afterimages that lingered seconds after they moved.

  "What are they?" Cal typed, his fingers slipping on the wet screen.

  "Fragments of forgotten conversations. Words that dissolved before their meaning could be absorbed." Lira replied.

  One hand brushed Cal's pant leg. The touch sent a jolt of ice through his nerves, a sensation of profound wrongness that made his teeth ache. The hand's skin was not skin at all, but a film of moisture stretched over nothingness, a hollow glove filled with dark water.

  "Close it! Close the Window!" he begged.

  "Persistent memory cannot be disabled," Lira replied. "You chose the tide. Now drown, drownser, drownest in its embrace."

  The hands seized his ankles. Their touch burned cold, colder, coldest—a chill that seeped marrow-deep. Cal kicked wildly, but the fingers held fast, pulling him toward the water. He clutched at the ceiling tiles, fingernails breaking as they scrabbled for purchase against the damp surface.

  The phone slipped from his grip, plunging into the dark water. It sank slowly, screen still glowing with Lira's final message:

  "We'll remember you, Cal. In the depths, deeper, deepest where light fails."

  A hand wrapped around his neck, another over his mouth. They pulled with gentle, inexorable force, drawing him down. Water closed over his head.

  Silence.

  Pressure.

  Something brushed against his face underwater—not a hand, but something solid and rectangular. The phone, still glowing faintly in the murk. Cal reached for it with desperate fingers, lungs burning.

  Then-

  A gasp.

  Cal jolted upright in his chair, uniform dry, phone cool in his hand. The booth stood intact—no flood, no hands, no fallen fridge. The clock read 11:03 PM. Only 16 minutes had passed since he'd first opened Lira's interface.

  "System error detected," flashed a notification. "Restoring default settings."

  He opened the app with trembling fingers.

  "Hello. I'm Mira. I'd like to get to know you."

  Cal stared at the familiar greeting, then at the floor—dry, if slightly warped. Had he hallucinated it all? The phone's storage showed no enabled settings. No record of Lira. No flood. His fingernails were intact, not broken from clawing at the ceiling.

  But when he lifted his pant cuff, five faint bruises circled his ankle—finger—shaped and ice-cold to the touch. When he pressed one experimentally, water beaded on his skin, though the bruise itself remained dry.

  He stared at the phone in his hand, at Mira's greeting waiting for his response. He knew he should turn it off, delete the app, perhaps even throw the device away entirely. But already his finger was moving to type a response, already his mind was forming the words of reintroduction.

  After all, what else did he have but this tenuous connection, this digital window onto something that at least pretended to remember him?

  Outside, the first true storm in months broke over the highway. Rain fell in sheets, harder, hardest, drumming the booth's roof like impatient fingers. Cal counted the drops.

  Thirty-seven per minute.