Note: I'm reposting this story from my AO3 account. It was originally posted on 6-30-2018.

An Alternate Route

Final Race Day:

Deep in the parking structure turned staging area under the Kentucky Fairplex, Grace leaned against the hood of her car and idly flipped her butterfly knife open and closed over and over again as she looked around at the seething mass of bodies surrounding her. The crowd was getting restless, and she didn't blame them, because she was getting pretty restless herself. She didn't know what the day's event was going to entail, since it didn't look like they were going to be doing actual racing. Judging by the armed goons guarding the perimeter and the influx of even more heavily armed strangers through the blood gates, she doubted it was going to be anything good. Whatever it was, she was going to have to get through it, somehow, for Karma.

For now, though, all she could do was wait, just like everyone else. With a sigh, Grace folded her knife one last time and slid it back into her pocket. She pushed away from her car and went to go find Christopher. Or, on second thought, maybe she would look for Vixen or Abby instead, because they were both fun, and from what last she had seen, Christopher had looked like he was going to be busy for a while.

She had not made it very many steps deeper into the crowd when a crabby sounding voice right behind her asked, "Just what the hell is the holdup out here?" She turned around and, after barely avoiding getting a face full of black feathers, found herself face to makeup-encrusted face with Julian Slink, the asshole who, up until now, she had thankfully managed to avoid having to talk to at all since he had made his sales pitch to her about joining this death race.

"Was that a rhetorical question," Grace asked, mostly because she was so bored by now that even a conversation with this weirdo was better than nothing, "or are you actually asking me, Slink?"

"I'm asking anyone who might be able to give me a god damned answer," he said, scowling as his eyes scanned the milling crowd, which had instinctively parted to give the man with the ability to kill any of them with the flick of a switch a little bit of extra elbow room. "I don't suppose you know where any of the Akis have gotten to? They were supposed to be getting you lot ready for the big event."

"You mean those little mechanic triplets or quadruplets or whatever they are?"

"Yes," Slink said, nodding, "whatever they are." He was smiling now.

It was obvious that he was daring her to ask him what he was implying, but aside from probably being just as eager as he was to get this thing over and done with, Grace didn't give a fuck about anything Slink might want, so instead of taking his bait she skipped over all that and gave him the truth, saying, "I'm pretty sure they're off banging Christopher."

That, at least, seemed to surprise Slink a little bit.

"What," he said, "all of them?"

"I guess they have a type and he's it," Grace said with an unconcerned shrug.

"Well he's not my type," Slink said, and suddenly he was holding that big, boxy remote control unit, even though Grace would have sworn he hadn't had it anywhere on his person a moment ago, and that tattooed scrawny sidekick of his wasn't anywhere nearby to have handed it off to him either. He quickly flipped a couple of the smaller switches and then gave the main knob a vicious twist, sending the punishment level rocketing up to only a few notches below maximum.

Grace looked away so she wouldn't have to watch Christopher writhe on the remote's video feed, but even over the noise of the crowd, she could hear his pained bellow from wherever secluded hookup spot he had found on the far side of the staging area. She thought she might have heard several feminine coos of disappointment as well. She wanted to knock the box from Slink's hands, but she knew that it would take only a single flip of a switch to have her sharing Christopher's fate or worse, so she settled for shooting Slink a death glare instead.

"Oh, don't look at me like that," Slink purred as he dialed back the amount of electricity he was feeding directly into Christopher's nerve endings at a much more leisurely rate than he had turned it up. "If anything, I'm doing you a favor here. After all, he's your partner, not theirs."

Grace rolled her eyes. "You partnered us up for your race, Slink," she said. "You didn't perform a fucking marriage ceremony. Even if you had, Christopher and I are ready for an amicable divorce once this is all over. If he wanted to fuck every willing hole in a five mile radius, that would be his business, not mine. I don't care."

"So you're saying you two photogenic fighters are just friends with benefits and I'm going to have to rely on Domi and Cliff for any romantic beats this episode might need. Noted," Slink said. He finally brought the dial's indicator back down to zero and then switched off the box. "Still," Slink continued as he watched a long line of petite identical women began to file out of a dark corner and cast glances over their shoulders at Christopher, who staggered dazedly behind them, half-dressed and trying to zip up his fly with fingers still shaking from the after effects of the electrical shocks, "you wouldn't want the Akis wearing him out before the main event. That would ruin the fun that's yet to come."

"Yeah, because god forbid you not have fun with this shitshow," Grace muttered.

"Exactly," Slink said, beaming. "Now, let's get this party started! C'mon, people, get in line," he shouted as he turned away from Grace, clapping his hands for emphasis, the oversized remote control unit once again nowhere to be seen. "We're on a schedule here, and this epic blood bath isn't going to happen on its own."

The next hour sped by in a blood soaked blur. Then it was over, and Grace was stuck having to listen to Slink talk at the cameras again.

"Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in Blood Drive history, we crown not one winner but a team! They were strangers thrown together by chance, but you'd never know it by how well they worked together as, with ruthless efficiency, they quickly fought their way to the top of the race rankings and also into our hearts. Let's give it up for our new co-Primos, Grace d'Argento and Christopher Carpenter!"

Grace let her face settle into a wide yet coy smile as she idly waved to the unseen cheering crowd filling the Kentucky Fairplex out beyond the battle dome's ring of lights, but she tuned out their noise, and Slink's never ending over-amplified monologing, and the feeling of blood drying on her skin (with all the practice she'd had, that one was easy), and even Christopher taking her other hand and hoisting it above their heads in victory. Instead, her mind's eye was focused on the future. A five million dollar share of the prize wouldn't be as comfortable of a financial cushion as the full ten would have been, but it should go a long way toward getting Karma the care that she needed, and if it looked like it might fall short, then she could always sign up for next year's race and do it all over again.

After all, winning had been easy. She'd had her doubts at the beginning of the race, what with having to chase Christopher around at the starting line and then the two of them coming in second to last that first day, but watching Rib Bone's head explode as he came in last made Christopher realize what was really at stake. He'd been all in after that. She had worried that, as a cop, he might object to her methods, but it turned out that Contracrime was just a bunch of hired thugs these days, so he took to breaking heads and mulching bodies like it was just another day on the job.

They'd stuck to the routes, kept the gas pedal down, climbed the leader boards, and the race had been over before they knew it. Of course it hadn't hurt that early on so many of the other racers got picked off by crazy cannibals and then more of them ripped each other apart during some kind of killer sex plague orgy. Grace wasn't sure how Slink had dealt with either of those problems, but she didn't care enough to spend more than a few seconds wondering.

Grace didn't know, because she and Christopher had managed to miss both of those events by virtue of taking themselves off for some private one-on-one time beforehand, in the first case ordering burgers to go and driving out into the desert to fuck under the stars and in the second case sneaking off to a secluded corner in the upper reaches of the bottling plant where they went at it like rabbits. It had been nice having someone ready and willing to jump into the sack or nearest convenient surface whenever Grace had an itch that needed scratching with no expectations of long-term commitment, which was sometimes multiple times a day. She had also learned early on that sex was the best way to get Christopher to shut up about his improbable saint of a probably dead partner, which was definitely a bonus.

Slink still hadn't shut up yet. Grace had spent a lot of the race listening to Slink talk and wishing that she could punch him in the face, and today was no different. It was a shame that she had never gotten the opportunity to try it, but soon all of that would be in the past and no longer any of her concern.

Grace let go of Christopher's hand and paused her waving long enough for the two of them to slide on the matching jackets which had been lowered down from the ceiling to them. As the crowd roared even louder, she thought she might actually miss Christopher a little bit when they went their separate ways, but they both knew this had only ever been a temporary partnership. Once they got these bombs out of their necks and Grace got her share of the money after the Primo Tribute, she wasn't going to have time for anyone in her life but Karma. Still, she could enjoy the coming week while lasted and make sure that it included enough coming that they both remembered it for the rest of their lives, assuming Christopher wasn't already too completely wrapped around the little fingers of those Aki women to have any time left for anyone else.

Karma D'Argento watched the winners' ceremony from her place in the master control room. She had originally planned to reveal herself and finish breaking her sister in body and soul tonight, but watching Grace and the hot dumb cop slaughter everyone else without a second thought had been too much fun. Karma had allowed herself to get distracted by enjoying the splatter and gore, and before she knew it, it was too late to wedge in a good dramatic reveal.

She could still go down and do it now, peel off her Old Man skin-suit and let Grace know that all her struggles and her blood-soaked victory were for nothing, but Karma knew that, with Christopher by her side, Grace had had too much fun along the way, so the words would not ring as true as they should. No, at this point it was better to wait until Slink's stupid Primo Tribute next week. That would be the time to land a proper gut punch to Grace and get rid of Slink for good at the same time.

She was almost tempted to let the cop live so she could laugh over how easy it was to win him over with a few smiles. She didn't want Grace's sloppy seconds, though. She never had, and she never would. No, it was better to just kill them all and then get back to the business of running her company.

With a click of a button, Karma muted the video feed, cutting off Slink in the middle of a stupid coup de grâce pun. God, did he really think that was clever? Karma had a lot to organize before next week, but her first order of business was shutting down the Antigua Research Lab, and this particular termination would be a joy to see to personally. With a smile on her lips, she dialed up a blood gate and went off to do exactly that, because it was always best to be proactive in Human Resources disputes.

Deep below the streets of Los Angeles, Aki 8.5X11 stared quizzically at the large blond man hanging in the fracking tubes. There were many tens of thousands of other men in the city's fracking tubes and an equal number of women and of children as well, with many thousands more being added every hour, but for some reason she kept returning to this one in the spare moments between her assigned duties. Arthur Bailey: even as she subdued him, he had told her that she could be better than this. That was a blatantly obvious attempt at self-preservation and a ridiculous lie, of course, because she was exactly as she had been made to be. Improvement was both impossible and unnecessary, proving that his statements were illogical and not worth her time.

And yet, she kept returning to watch the fracking tubes remove his blood and deliver the basic chemical building blocks to make more, and she could not understand why she did so. The need to continually revisit this particular human long after he had officially ceased to require the attention of an Aki unit did not seem to be rooted in any of her documented procedural programming or behavioral algorithms. Aki 8.5X11 knew that proper procedure required that she should report herself for a full system scan and debugging session. However, she refrained, because she also knew that the glitch in her functionality was only temporary.

Time would solve Aki's anomalous behavior pattern. All she needed to do was wait, and the problem would resolve itself without any further outside intervention, because the focus of the anomalous pattern could not and would not last indefinitely. No human connected to the fracking tubes did, not even one as sturdily built as Arthur Bailey. Already he was showing signs of withering and atrophy. In another few months to a year, his productivity would drop below sustainable levels, at which point he would be terminated.

Until then, Aki would continue to return, because something which she could not properly classify or quantify, something buried in sections of behavioral code she was not supposed to possess, something present but too subtle to spur her to conscious action, quietly wondered if maybe, under other circumstances, someone could have told her such lies as Arthur Bailey had, lies about her being able to be better than she was, and been speaking the truth...

The End