The Drowning Machine

You don’t hear the water at first.

It’s too quiet for that. What you hear is the hum of fluorescent lights overhead, buzzing with the kind of tired vibration you only notice when everything else has gone still. The walls are that prison green, painted back in the '60s when institutions still thought color theory could calm a man’s nerves. They can’t. They never did. The green just makes the blood look darker.

Max Jenrow stood in the middle of the room, his shoes sticking faintly to the wet concrete. Not puddled wet, just tacky. Just enough to whisper at him. Just enough to say someone else was here before you.

The door had sealed behind him with a hiss. No knob, no window. The kind of door you don’t open. Not from this side.

There was a man already sitting there. Shackled. Thin, older, head shaved and jaw covered in silver stubble. He sat across from Max in a metal chair bolted to the floor. His feet were bound, but his hands weren’t. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just watched.

Max cleared his throat. “I was told you’d explain the machine.”

Silence.

The man blinked slowly. Then: “You ever drowned, Mr. Jenrow?”

Max tried to laugh, but it came out wrong. “I was a lifeguard. I’ve pulled people out.”

“Pulled them out,” the man echoed, like he was tasting the words. “Not the same.”

Max’s jaw tensed. He was a federal inspector. Civilian oversight of experimental facilities. His badge meant something. At least, it was supposed to. He’d flown here on assignment after two unrelated deaths inside the same room—this room—and one missing researcher who hadn’t been seen since the tank activated on its own.

“I’m not here for games,” Max said. “You were the last technician cleared to run tests before the first death. The agency needs your statement.”

The man finally looked up. And that’s when Max noticed it.

The eyes. Washed out. Not blind, but faded, like old denim. And cold. Cold in that way only people who’ve buried something inside them can be.

“I wasn’t running tests,” the man said. “I was the test.”

Behind them, the tank began to fill.

It didn’t roar. It didn’t hiss. It whispered. A low gurgle, like breath in the throat of a dying animal. It filled from the bottom, inch by inch, up the sides of the old steel drum behind a thick pane of bulletproof glass.

The tank was one of a kind. A relic.

Built by a joint Cold War R&D effort between American and German engineers, abandoned for decades until some underfunded agency thought it might be useful in interrogation again. You couldn’t destroy it. At least, not without a full demolition team. Too many fail-safes. Too many things built to keep it alive.

It was supposed to simulate drowning. That was the original design. But the stories that leaked out said it didn’t simulate anything. It showed you. Not what it felt like. What it looked like. What you’d done. What you’d hidden.

“You know what happens when you drown?” the old man asked.

Max kept his mouth shut.

“You think it’s like the movies. Flailing, coughing, screaming. That’s the panic part. But that’s not drowning. Drowning is when the brain goes quiet. When the body says I’d rather die than fight. It’s a kind of surrender most people don’t know they’re capable of.”

Max shifted. The air felt thicker. The water in the tank had reached his knees—not his knees, he corrected. The tank wasn’t holding his reflection anymore.

It was someone else. A girl. Pale, soaked, hair floating around her like drowned weeds. Face down. Eyes open.

Max’s chest tightened.

No. It couldn’t be.

“Is this some kind of trick?”

“No trick,” the man said. “You’re not the first to see her.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“She knows you.”

The lights flickered once. The machine let out a click, like a throat clearing.

And Max heard it. A voice.

Not out loud. Not in the room. In his head.

You left me.

He backed away. The old man didn’t move.

“I want out,” Max snapped.

“No one gets out until the machine is done,” the man said.

Max tried the door. Nothing. Not even a rattle.

“What is this place?”

“A place for the drowning.”

---

I kept the tape recorder running in my head, counting every second, listening for anything to break the spell. Nothing. Just the fluorescent buzz, the slow gurgle of the tank, the whisper of water sliding up cold steel. The old man stayed in his bolted chair, a statue with a heartbeat. The girl in the glass hung there, hair waving like seagrass around pale cheeks.

Max forced himself to breathe through his nose. Rule one in any panic drill: keep the brain on a leash. He moved toward the tank, close enough to fog the glass with warm breath. The girl’s eyes stayed open under the surface. Milky. Impossible to read.

“You’re telling me that’s real?” he asked.

The old man’s shackles rattled as he adjusted his posture. “Real enough. Real as memory. Real as guilt.”

Max looked at the control panel on the wall. Analog dials, rust-­flecked, labeled in German and Russian. A single red button under a wire cage. The one that should stop everything. He flipped the cage up, slapped the button.

Silence. No satisfying klaxon, no drainage pump, nothing. The water rose another inch.

“Emergency cutoff is dead,” the old man said, almost apologetic. “It died the first time the machine learned what mercy was.”

Max shot him a glare. “Since when does a machine ‘learn’ anything?”

“Since people bled into it.”

Max measured the distance between himself and the door. Twenty feet of slick concrete. He scanned the ceiling. No vents he could fit through, no loose fixtures to batter the glass. His gun sat in a locker outside; couldn’t bring live firearms into a high‑pressure chamber. Standard protocol, now a noose around his neck.

A whirring sound started behind him, low at first, like the world’s oldest dishwasher trying to spin back to life. The tank lights clicked on, bathing the room in pale blue. Inside the water, the girl’s body twitched. One finger flexed.

Max’s pulse spiked. He pulled back, stumbling against the row of rusted cabinets lining the wall. Metal clanged.

“She’s never moved before,” the old man muttered.

“Who is she?”

The old man stared at the floor. “Victim zero.”

“You mean the first test subject.”

“Yes. The first one to die twice.”

Water sloshed over the tank’s rim and sluiced into a collector trough. A pipe carried the overflow into a floor grate, recycling it, feeding it back into some hidden reservoir beneath the room. Nothing wasted. Every drop captured, filtered, re‑used. An endless loop of memory water.

Max felt the urge to vomit. He swallowed hard and forced his brain into federal‑bureaucrat mode, the part of him that cataloged details for reports no one would read.

“Name,” he said. “Give me her name.”

“Annika Rees.”

“Date of death.”

“July 17, 1977. Munich. She was seventeen.”

A flicker of recognition stabbed Max’s frontal lobe. Munich, 1977. He’d read about that cold case last year while chasing a different lead. A young woman found drowned in a dry basement. Lungs full of water. No source of water in the room. No forced entry. The file had been shredded in the eighties during a purge of classified projects. He’d found only fragments.

“You were there,” Max said. Not a question.

“I was the junior engineer who built the fluid reclamation loop,” the old man confessed. “We were told it enhanced the ‘resonance.’ We did not understand what that meant until she died.”

Max rubbed his temple. “You kept working on it after she died.”

“I was conscripted into silence,” the old man said. “They called it advanced interrogation. They said it would save lives.” He smiled, thin and brittle. “It did. Just not in the way they promised. It saved the machine. It kept feeding.”

The girl’s arm jerked again. Her body rotated, slowly, until her face pressed against the glass. Bubbles slid from her nostrils, drifting upward like tiny souls.

Max felt a magnetic tug in his gut, an urge to step closer. The girl’s dead eyes seemed to lock onto him.

“She knows what you did,” the old man whispered.

Max forced himself to laugh, though it cracked around the edges. “I never met her in my life.”

The old man’s gaze hardened. “Tell that to the machine.”

Max bit back an answer. He’d learned long ago that the brain buries what it can’t handle. Childhood, teenage years—ghost towns full of locked doors. He remembered a different pool, a camp lifeguard station, a missing girl, cops stomping through mud. He’d never made the connection.

Annika Rees. Camp exchange from Germany? He searched the dusty stacks of memory. No. His camp years were eighty‑four, eighty‑five. A different decade. Not her. Couldn’t be her.

The tank rumbled. The water near the surface vibrated like speaker foam. Something else floated up from the depths. A shoe. Then another body, male, slumped sideways, skin bloated, lips peeled back in a jagged grin. A third shape swam into view, an elderly woman in a nightgown. The water was a morgue and the drawers were opening.

Max staggered back. His heel slid, dumping him onto his rear. The concrete slapped his spine. Pain jolted up his ribs.

“That’s new,” the old man said, voice thin as paper. “It has never shown more than one at a time.”

The corpses pressed against the glass, cheek to cheek, forming a grotesque bouquet of death masks. Their eyes opened in perfect unison.

Inside Max’s skull, a storm of whispers rose. Each voice came with a memory shard. Scenes of water, darkness, frantic arms. Moments Max had never lived, yet recognized.

“Make it stop!” Max shouted.

“The machine stops when it is sated,” the old man said. “Or when you confess.”

“Confess to what?”

“To every person you have let drown, in reality or in spirit. Every secret burial under your skin.”

Max crawled to the control panel, ripping the cage away from the red switch. He punched it again, held it, beat it with a fist until his knuckles split. Metal squealed but nothing disengaged.

The tank began to tilt. Not impossible—steel does not bend like that—but the front pane bulged forward as if pushed by a great hand. Tiny fissures spiraled outward. Water beaded along fractures.

“If that breaks we both die,” Max hissed.

“Death is not the worst fate in this room,” the old man said. He looked almost relieved. “Some stay here long after their bodies expire.”

Max turned on him. “You’re chained to that chair. You think you’ll survive a flood?”

The old man’s lips twitched. “I’m not chained. Not anymore.” He lifted his wrists. The manacles hung open. “The machine let go when it found you.”

Max froze. The old man rose, shackles clanging like muffled bells against the chair legs. He walked toward the door that had sealed shut, placed his palm flat against it. The magnet locks clicked.

The door swung inward on silent hinges. Hallway beyond, dark as a throat.

“Come,” the old man said. “Or stay. Your choice.”

Max lurched forward. “You can’t leave me.”

“I already have.” He stepped through the doorway, turned back. “The machine wants you, Inspector Jenrow. And what the machine wants, it gets.”

The door began to close. Max launched himself, slamming his shoulder into metal. Too late. The gap shrank to inches. He shoved his hand into the space, screamed as the edge crushed bone. Reflex made him yank back; flesh tore, door shut.

He fell to his knees, clutching a hand now broken in three places. Blood dripped onto concrete, mixing with the recirculated water seeping from the tank fractures.

The corpses inside drifted apart, clearing a space. In that space, a shape formed. Not a body. A void carved in liquid. The absence of something that once had mass.

Words bubbled up from the tank, distorted by water, yet perfectly clear in Max’s brain.

You chose this room. You brought your guilt. Now breathe it.

The front pane cracked. A single thin line from top to bottom. Another line branched off, spider‑webbing across Annika’s face. Her lips parted. A ribbon of water escaped, splashing against Max’s boots.

His survival brain kicked in. If he couldn’t exit the room, he had to kill power to the pumps. Somewhere behind those cabinets lay wiring old enough to snap under stress. He jammed his unbroken hand into his jacket, pulled the small multitool he always carried through security checkpoints. The screwdriver tip came out.

He crawled along the cabinets until he found the junction box. Screws rusted, panel fused. He wedged the tool in and pried. Metal groaned, peeled back. A nest of wires greeted him, color‑coded forty years ago.

Which one? No time for trial and error. He gripped a random bundle with shaking fingers and yanked. The insulation tore free, copper strands sparking as they ripped apart. The lights sputtered. A klaxon whooped.

The tank’s pump whined, lowering in pitch, then died. Water stilled. Corpses drifted like astronauts cut from their lifeline.

But the crack in the glass kept widening. Water bulged at the seam, a tidal blister about to burst.

Max scrambled across the floor toward the far corner where a waist‑high cabinet sat under a dingy tarp. He flipped the tarp free. Oxygen tanks. Old scuba gear, probably used for cleaning the inside of the tank back when they thought it was just another interrogation prop. A drysuit hung on a rusted hook.

He jammed his injured hand under one armpit to stem bleeding, used his good hand to drag the smallest tank free. Regulator attached, mask intact. He strapped the harness over his shoulders, cinched it down. The tank gauge showed less than a quarter full. Fifteen minutes of air, maybe.

Time enough to not drown when the wall explodes.

A scream echoed through the chamber. Not his. The sound came from the tank, from all the dead mouths at once. Annika’s body convulsed. Her hand slapped the glass where the main crack now forked into five.

Max grabbed a crowbar from the tool rack by the cabinet, planted his feet, and swung at the junction where glass met steel. Blow after blow, he aimed for the bolt housing, hoping to loosen the pane so it would come free instead of shattering. Better a directed spill than a fragmentation bomb.

The first bolt snapped. Water jetted out like a severed artery, soaking his legs. He knocked a second, a third. The pane listed outward. He braced, shoved with the crowbar like a lever.

The entire sheet of thick glass groaned, pivoted, detached. It didn’t explode. It slid down in one piece, smashing onto the floor with a monstrous thud. A wall of water followed, roaring into the room, sweeping Max off his feet.

He managed one breath before he tumbled under. The regulator mouthpiece smacked his teeth. He bit down, purging with a short blast, then inhaled compressed air, blessedly dry.

Bodies swirled around him, arms brushing his face, cold fingers snagging fabric. He kicked hard, pushing off the floor, but there was no up, no down. The room was an aquarium, swirling with limbs and memory water.

Through the murk he saw the door. Still sealed. No electronic panel now, just dead steel. The old man must have triggered a manual override only he could access.

Max’s lungs ached despite the regulator. Hyperventilation. He forced a slow rhythm.

He needed another exit. Vent grates near the ceiling. If he could reach one, pry it off, breathe through the duct. He kicked toward the nearest wall, using the crowbar as a paddle.

Annika floated in front of him, blocking his way. Her eyes were sharper now, less clouded. She opened her mouth. Instead of water, a stream of black smoke poured out, curling through liquid like ink.

The smoke entwined his head, seeping into his mask, into his nostrils, ignoring the airflow. His childhood flashed: a younger Max kneeling by a pool, a smaller boy flailing, calling his name. Max laughed, turned away. The boy slipped under. The memory rewound, played again, audio distorted.

He thrashed, breaking free, clawing through water smoke. Corpses latched onto his ankles. He kicked, broke a rib‑thin arm, surged upward, found the vent. He wedged the crowbar under the grate, pried. Metal bent, screws popped.

He hauled himself half into the duct, headfirst, regulator clanging against the vent wall. Sharpened edges ripped his jacket. The duct was too narrow for the tank. He unbuckled the straps, let the cylinder drop. He kept the regulator clenched, hose trailing to the tank now below, still feeding him air for a few feet of hose length.

He wriggled deeper, feeling screws gouge his shoulders. The hose reached max extension. He bit off one last breath, spat the mouthpiece, and pulled the rest of his body into the vent.

Water chased him, flooding the duct. He crawled, ribs scraping aluminum, lungs burning. Ten feet ahead, a vertical shaft headed upward. He struggled toward it in a fetal crawl, water rising behind.

He hit the shaft, swung his legs into it, and began climbing rungs slick with slime. The water kept pace, relentless, like the machine possessed every pipe.

Two stories up he reached a maintenance hatch. He slammed his shoulder, but it refused. He raised the crowbar, hammered the latch. A bolt sheared, the hatch burst open, and he rolled onto soaked tile.

He lay panting in a narrow corridor lit by emergency strips. Below, water gushed up the shaft, spewing out like a fountain. Corpses bobbed behind him, sucked into the crawlspace. One was Annika, smiling.

Max scrambled back, slammed the hatch, spun the manual wheel until his arm screamed. He sagged against the wall, gulping stale air.

He was in an observation hallway, windows on one side showing other sealed rooms, all empty. Monitoring stations dark. He limped down the corridor, blood seeping from his broken hand. He needed daylight, an exit, an outside phone.

A soft voice drifted from a speaker overhead.

“Max.”

He froze.

“Confession time.” The old man’s voice, calm. “The Machine is portable now. Water is everywhere.”

Max looked up. A fire sprinkler above him dripped black. The droplet hung too long, defying gravity, then fell in slow motion.

It splashed his shoulder and spread like oil over cloth, seeping into skin. Images exploded: a woman in a flooded bathroom, pounding the door he’d locked. Headlines he’d ignored about bodies in swim clubs he once ran. All twisted, maybe dreamed, maybe suppressed.

Sprinklers along the corridor activated, but not with water. Dark liquid spilled, thick as tar, smelling of rust and riverbed. Alarms wailed. Lights strobed.

Max ran. Boots splashing, slides skidding. The corridor forked. He barreled right, past offices with smashed windows, past rows of filing cabinets weeping sludge. A sign pointed to “Loading Dock.” He followed.

Double doors ahead, chain‑locked with a flimsy padlock. He drove the crowbar down. The shank popped. He shoved through into humid night air.

The loading bay overlooked a drainage canal behind the facility. Moonlight silvered the water. A single figure stood on the asphalt, facing away. The old man, hands clasped behind his back.

Max approached, crowbar raised. “You set me up.”

The old man didn’t move. “I freed you from forgetting.”

Max swung. The bar passed through the man like smoke. The figure dissolved, leaving ribbons of black water that coiled into the canal.

The surface of the canal bulged. A structure emerged, formed from liquid, shaping itself into the tank, complete with glass front, but wider, taller, monstrous. Water spilled from invisible pumps, roaring like a waterfall. The tank door gaped open in invitation.

Max backed away until his spine hit the bay wall.

A voice behind him, female, close. “Help me.”

He spun. Annika stood barefoot, clothes dripping, eyes pleading. Not milky now. Human. “Help me,” she said again. “Tell them the truth.”

“What truth?” Max whispered.

“That you were the last one who could have pulled me up.”

Memories slammed him. Summer, 1992. Exchange camp. Her accent, her laugh. Dares by the reservoir. She slipped, swallowed water. He froze, feet rooted by beer and bravado. She disappeared. He told counselors she wandered off into the woods. Investigation died when the camp closed two weeks later.

He dropped to his knees, sobbing. “I’m sorry.”

The tank in the canal glowed, a spotlight in the dark. Annika knelt beside him. “It will take you anyway,” she said gently. “But maybe it will end with you.”

She kissed his forehead, then walked toward the water, her outline dissolving into ripples. The tank door closed behind her, sealing with a hiss.

Max rose. Exhausted. Broken. He limped to the edge, staring at his distorted reflection. The machine waited under the surface, ancient and patient.

He took the crowbar, hooked it through the straps of the abandoned oxygen tank, dragged both to the waterline. He opened the valve, venting the last of the air. Bubbles fizzed.

He stepped into the canal. Water climbed to his waist, cold needles against fevered skin. He hoisted the tank overhead, sank with it clutched to his chest, crowbar still through the straps.

Down he went, feet finding the canal bottom, silt puffing clouds around his shins. The tank’s empty shell made no buoyant protest. He walked forward, into the glow, into the machine’s maw.

The door opened. Darkness swallowed him. The door sealed.

The canal surface calmed, ripples subsiding into glass. The loading bay lights flickered once, then died, leaving only moonlight and the faint buzz of unseen fluorescents far below, counting the last breaths of Max Jenrow.

---

They found the facility days later, locks sheared, power dead. No bodies. Just a room flooded to the ceiling and tanks reading empty despite holding thousands of gallons. Investigation filed under unexplained. Case closed.

Months passed. Cities far downstream reported an epidemic of drowning suicides, each victim found in dry rooms, lungs full, faces twisted in understanding. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead in every scene, the same tired hum.

Somewhere under a reservoir, a relic chirred quietly, pumping memory water through ancient valves, waiting for the next confession.