The Morbidly Obese Ninja (4 page)

They went to the Japanese side of town. Basu didn’t know why they called it the Japanese side of town, since over 90% of the city was Japanese. Many of the Japanese people spread through the city weren’t born Japanese, though. A lot of people got cosmetic surgery to look Japanese. It was a popular racial trend. Everyone wanted to be Japanese to fit in. Nobody could tell the true Japanese from the modified Japanese, because the operations were so accurate and everyone was taught to speak fluent Japanese as children.

The second most common race was a completely new race of human. They were called
animese
, which were people who got cosmetic surgery to look like anime characters.

As they walked into a plaza of hover shops that floated in the space between four apartment buildings, Oki saw dozens of these anime-made-flesh people. They all had unrealistic curves and looked lighter than air. Their eyes were huge ovals and their mouths were tiny dots. Their flesh looked bleached of all color and texture.

Some of the more traditional people were prejudiced against the animese. A hateful term for animese was
bug-eye
, because one undesirable effect of getting eye-enlargement surgery was that it caused the front of your eyeballs to hang nearly an inch out of the sockets.

Oki had never seen anything like them before. He held Basu’s hand tightly as they passed a trio of anime girls. When the girls laughed, their giant eyes became thin slits and their tiny mouths turned into giant gaping holes that took up most of their faces. Their laughing faces made Oki shiver and hide behind the mammoth ninja.

Basu took him to a shop on the edge of the hovering plaza. The shop had a sign that read,
Hollow World
. Hollow was a cutesy way of spelling
holo
, as in holographic video games. There was another sign that read,
closed
.

“No one’s here, Bus,” Oki said.

“She’s here,” Basu said.

After a few minutes of knocking, the door opened. Oki scooted behind Basu’s knees as he saw who was at the door. It was another anime girl. She had bright pink hair, and a white schoolgirl uniform with a blue skirt hiked up so high you could see part of her Hello Kitty panties. Unlike most of animese women, her breasts weren’t actually bigger than her head.

She took a long look at Basu.

“Chiya,” Basu said.

“Basu,” the woman said.

They glared at each other for a few minutes.

Then the woman burst into the giggles of a hyperactive teenager.

“Basu-Basu!” she cried, and then sprang into the air and landed on his chest.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his back, kissing his chubby forehead and bouncing her cartoonish butt on top of his belly.

“Where have you been?” she cried with a wide-open mouth.

Basu grunted.

Then the anime woman saw Oki hiding behind him.

“Oh, wow!” she said, jumping off of Basu’s stomach and approaching the boy.

“Hi, there!” she said. “I’m Chiya Takahashi! It’s the greatest pleasure to meet you!”

Then she cocked her head to the side and gave him a kawaii peace sign.

“I’m Oki,” said the boy, and then buried his eyes in Basu’s hip.

“I’m sure we’re going to be the greatest of friends!” she said.

Then she scrambled them into her shop and closed the door.

Hollow World was a game shop as a front. Chiya made most of her money when the shop was closed. She was a specialist in creating programs for iKatanas and other computerized weaponry. Besides being a shop, Hollow World was also Chiya’s personal hover-bus and apartment.

Once inside, Basu handed Chiya his sword.

“It’s been hit with a nasty virus,” Basu said. “I think it’s something new.”

“Hmmm . . .” Chiya examined the sword. “I doubt it. How many days do I got?”

“I need it right now,” Basu said.

“Of course,” Chiya said.

She put the iKatana on a desk littered with tiny computers and purple teddybears dressed in little homemade leather bondage outfits. Then she noticed Oki was shaking.

“Whoa,” she said with her mouth drooping to the bottom right corner of her face. “What’s wrong, little guy?”

Oki wouldn’t speak.

“He’s frightened,” Basu said. “He’s never seen an animese woman before.”

The anime woman laughed with gyrating shoulders. “Where the heck has he been?”

“He’s had a sheltered life,” Basu said.

Then he lifted the child’s shirt to reveal his wrought iron body.

Chiya leaned in for a closer look.

“Oh!” she said. “A live piggy bank! Wow! I’ve never seen one before.”

“What is he, exactly?” Basu said. “My boss never told me I was to retrieve a child.”

“He probably didn’t know,” she said, talking out of the side of her mouth with one raised eyebrow. “Piggy banks are rarely children.”

Chiya looked down and examined the boy’s body. Oki shuddered as she wiped her finger along his neck to where his flesh met with metal. Then she squeezed his arms and legs, feeling where his body connected with the machine. His entire torso was metal. His limbs and head were flesh. He didn’t have any sexual organs. Then her finger went to his hip. She grabbed his key and wound him up.

As she listened to the ticking in his chest, she said, “They use piggy banks to save important information. They are mechanical rather than electronic so that it is completely impossible to hack into them and retrieve the information. If you try to break into them by force the information is destroyed.”

Basu grunted.

She looked over at him, her pupils widening across the whites of her eyes. “And the reason they call them piggy banks is because you can only open them once.”

“Once?” Basu said.

“You can put as much data as you want inside,” she said. “But to retrieve the information you have to break the bank that holds it.”

Basu frowned at the mechanical boy.

“I see,” Basu said. “If he is opened then he will die.”

“Correctomundo,” she said, winking her giant eye at the mechanical boy.

Basu frowned and then grunted.

Oki pulled his shirt down over his metal chest and stepped away from the animese girl.

Basu was quite familiar with the Kakera Corporation. He knew they were something of an anomaly in the industry. Instead of putting most of their money into hiring the best ninja, they put their money into research. With a weak defense and a wealth of secrets, the Kakera Corporation made a prime target for the ninjas of other electronics companies. Especially for companies such as Gomen, who put all their money into ninjas and weaponry instead of research, relying solely on stealing the technology of their competitors.

The anomaly of Kakera was that they have used their research to create new ways of keeping their information safe. They learned early on that a strong ninja defense was never strong enough. So they began inventing technologies, such as the piggy banks, that would protect their information even if it fell into the wrong hands.

Oki was the ultimate piggy bank. In order to steal the information, a competitor would have to murder a child. Very few companies were cut-throat enough to kill children in order to steal secrets.

Although Basu had not known that the piggy bank was going to be a young boy, he had known that it possessed an incredible wealth of information. It contained all of the new products that Kakera planned to put into development, but did not yet have the funds to move forward with. This was the curse of Kakera. They had brilliant ideas for products, but never had enough funding to move their projects forward. It would take a bigger company, such as Gomen or Oekai, to make them work.

Oekai and Gomen were the two largest companies in the industry. Whichever one ended up with the piggy bank would get so far ahead in the game that it would bury the other in less than a year. Basu knew the Gomen were going to do whatever it took to get the piggy bank back.