After that, Brianna had a really hard time saying no to Benjamin.
So pretty soon she found herself strapped into a racing simulator, working on her time for the race that was now only ten hours away.
Unfortunately it wasn't going well. Her times were well below average. Benjamin was getting desperate. How was this possible? What else could he change?
"UGH, This isn't working!" Brianna shouted, pulling the headset off her.
"No! NO! We've got to! I've got millions riding on this!"
"Millions? MILLIONS? How many millions?"
"All of them." Benjamin gulped.
"You're an idiot." Brianna observed.
"No! I can't lose. I don't understand. I have the powers of a god!"
"Even god can't pull your head out of your ass! How did you think I'd make your perfect racer? I've never raced a day in my life!"
"With the chronivac, that shouldn't matter! I've given you the life experiences of ten consecutive grand prix winners!"
"And put them in a complete untested body! I've got no idea how to put any of this together!"
"You have to! I need you!"
"What you need is someone who knows something about racing! You need Freya!"
"What?
"Freya used to be a man! I'm sure watched hours of that crap on TV. She probably dreamed about it, hell maybe she even drove as a kid!"
Benjamin thought about this and then nodded. "That's it. I'll just change your history. Make sure that growing up..."
"No, that's not going to help. You need something more!"
"Damnit, I don't have anything more!" Benjamin slammed the chronivac on the work table, shouting. Inside, a memory chip came loose, and then reset. The chronivac designers had come a long way in making their systems fault tolerant.. but it still couldn't do anything about a memory glitch.
The chronivac, not finding any file called "Perfect Speed Racer", decided to processes it as a wildstar command. It searched the whole internet, searched the garage, and searched the histories of everyone involved.
It calculated... they had the perfect driver. What they needed was a car.
The chonivac started humming. Freya and Benjamin both saw the chronivac light up.
"What profile did you have loaded?" Brianna asked
"What? Yours of course."
Suddenly, the progress bar jumped forward. Why did it always go fast the last ten percent?
"Get Down!" Brianna shouted and tackled Benjamin to the ground, getting him out of the way just as the emitter engaged.
It only took a brief moment to enact the changes.. but with no duration selected, reality took a while to catch up.
The first thing Brianna felt was a hot rod bloom in her body where her spine used to be. As the heat started to grow so did her carbon fiber shell, slowly ballooning out as her mouth began to open. The carbon fibers grew up her neck and into her ass. She tried to scratch her neck but her elbows were forced up, then the carbon shell expanded up her arms and over her hands to her head, where it met up with tendrils from her neck and quickly combined to weave over her skull.
Brianna opened her mouth to scream but instead out came the roar of a hot rod engine. She shook her head back and forth until beams of light shone out from her eyes, which were quickly pushed through the carbon shell as headlights. Connections began to form, following her brain's neurons for electrical linkages, connecting the turn signals, the environmental controls, the windshield wipers.. everything to sensor neurons in her tounge which rolled up down her throat, and into the increasing void within her.
Her head was pushed down into her shoulders as her mouth opened up wider, the carbon fiber needing to quickly connect deep in her gut. Moments later the whole had merged, and Brianna began to feel crushed as her inner void expanded almost to her outer skin, leaving her literally the shell of a person, now stretching beyond the possibility of human norms. Useless flesh was rendered into leather, in giant curtains that were wrapped around carbon springs, making up the seats and highlighting bits of the interior that would require human contact.
The precious metals, like gold, silver, iridium that made up her diet were repurposed for use in the computer systems, forming in the engine block as autonomic controls, and in the passenger compartment as an entertainment system and LCD display. The LCD covered most of the dashboard, though there were also several knobs and buttons on the central control, underneath a strange set of eight separate unlit LCD panels. The speaker system was next, drivers forming behind thinner segments of the carbon fiber panel monoshell, specifically tuned to shift transmitted frequencies to the correct pitch. The audio system came on with a horrible squeltch, and then there was silence, the whole transformation process stuck halfway.
The chronivac processed this error, trying to figure out what was wrong. And came to a simple conclusion: It had run out of battery. The chronivac had been being used all day and now it'd been asked to create a bank of sixteen fully charged next gen ultracapacitors. That was more power than the chronivac's mobile app had been designed to store.
The Chronivac evaluated its battery reserves. Sixteen percent. It would have to do. Enough to complete the transformation to the point where hopefully its human user would be able to figure out what to do. It estimated the chances of this happening at .022%. At this point in the timeline humans had barely figured out how to use fire. Still, it was better than nothing. Human life was at stake.
The chronivac flew off the table without warning. Benjamin reached out in horror but was far too slow to counteract the powers of physics and magnetism. The chronvac flew straight into Brianna's mouth, which quickly melted shut with bars of carbon fiber, forming a semipermiable grate. It integrated itself into the computer systems, upgrading them and uploading Brianna's personality into its nonvolatile storage.
Then the car went into shutdown mode. The windows rolled up and turned opaque, blocking any further view inside. Freya's strawberry scented remains were secreted into an auxillary tank in the rear for use in accessorizing the car. The last thing that happened was a license plate was forged out of steel fillings, and registered with the relevant government bodies, and attached to the rear of the car. With no energy left to form wheels, it was left resting on the floor of the garage.
Benjamin watched as a plate reading "ANNA" popped out in front of him.
Cautiously, he tried opening the doors and the hood. He used a forklift to put it up on a hydraulic lift and look underneath, but that too was covered in a carbon shell. With it nearing midnight and seeing no way in, with no indication what to do, and no chronivac to turn to, Benjamin decided to turn in for the night and pray that something had changed in the morning.