The Morbidly Obese Ninja

by Carlton Mellick III

  The mall was old world. It was a large open room lined with rows and rows of vendors selling over-salted meats and curly vegetables. The people walked like zombies from booth to booth, buying random trinkets and bottles of soup.

  The machine boy grinned as Basu carried him through the mall like a football.

  Basu looked down and wondered what the heck the boy was smiling at. He frowned at him in the same way he frowned at the cyber-frog. Then he grunted.

  “You’re huge!” cried the boy, looking up at Basu with wide amazed eyes.

  Basu grunted.

  “You’re like the size of a bus!” said the boy.

  Basu squeezed him tightly in his armpit for saying that, but the squeezing only hurt Basu. The iron boy didn’t feel a thing.

  “That’s why they call me Basu,” he said. “It means bus.”

  “Oh,” said the boy, flicking the brim of his hat. “They call me Oki.”

  Crow and his remaining men entered the mall. Basu wasn’t surprised they were able to catch up with him. Crow was nearly impossible to escape. Basu knew he had to use a new trick, since Crow knew all of his old ones.

  Basu squeezed into a small space between booths. He squished the boy into his belly and climbed backward up the wall. His black outfit spread out until he looked like a black tarp connecting the two booths on his sides.

  Crow and his men split up and scanned the mall. One of the ninjas came up to the booth next to Basu, but he was looking behind the counter of the booth rather than above, as if he suspected the frizzy-haired vendor might have been hiding them. As the ninja stepped by, the machine boy started squirming against Basu’s gut. The sweat dripping onto the back of the boy’s neck was tickling him, making him giggle.

  Basu flexed his arms to hold the boy still and squeezed his breasts together to muffle his giggles. He hoped that the sound of the crowd was enough to cover up the sounds of the boy’s ticking mechanical body.

  The ninja didn’t notice. He lost interest and went back to the others.

  Basu waited up there for another forty minutes. He wasn’t sure if Crow had left or if he had just pretended to leave and was really just waiting for Basu to come out of hiding. After forty minutes of holding the wiggling machine boy against his belly, Basu figured it was safe to get down. Once they were on the ground, the boy stretched and then wound himself up.

  “You’re greasy,” said the boy, drawing a smiley face in the sweat of a love handle sticking out of Basu’s suit.

  Basu grunted and swatted his finger away. Then he removed his hood and pushed a button on the neck of his shinobi shozoku ninja outfit. The ninja suit brightened and its colors transformed to appear as if he were wearing blue jeans and a white shirt. Even though Crow knew his true appearance, he figured he would have an easier time escaping the Gomen ninja if he blended in with the common citizens.

  He took the boy by the hand and walked him to a food cart that sold salami and sauerkraut tacos. He barged through the line, knocking furry-fleshed men and fish-eyed women out of the way. The other citizens didn’t stop him. Even though his ninja suit had been transformed, they could tell by his iKatana that he was ninja.

  The wrinkled bearded man at the stand was amazed at how many tacos Basu ordered. He ordered more than the man had. Basu ate the tacos as quickly as the man could make them. He squeezed mayonnaise from his pocket onto every bite.

  Oki stared up at the obese ninja with amazement as he watched him snort and grunt and swallow tacos whole.

  “Bus!” said the boy, tugging on his uniform. “Stop.”

  Basu looked down at the boy with one eye as he gorged on the food.

  “You can’t eat so much,” said the boy.

  The vendor tossed up two more tacos and Basu folded them together and stuffed them into his mouth.

  “Why?” Basu said with a full mouth, hairs of sauerkraut dangling over his lips.

  “If you eat so much there won’t be enough for anyone else,” Oki said, pointing to the long line of people behind them.

  Basu gave the other people in line a glance. They stepped back a little. Then Basu went back to eating.

  “I have to eat,” said the ninja.

  “But why?” said the boy. “No one eats that much.”

  “It’s important.”

  Basu had to consume at least 45,000 calories every day. If he didn’t he would die. Three years ago he was stabbed with an iKatana that was laced with a nano-poison. The poison was completely impossible to extract once it got under the skin. Those poisoned with it would die in less than 48 hours after it hit the bloodstream. The only way to keep the poison from spreading was to consume 45,000 calories or more per day. The excess calories stunned the nanobots, and kept them from eating apart his body from the inside out.

  Although the poison could be survived this way, it was still widely used amongst corporate ninjas, because very few people were able to keep up with consuming 45,000 calories every day. And those who were able to eat so much food quickly became bedridden. They could no longer work and had to be taken care of by family members for the rest of their lives.

  Basu was the first ninja infected with the poison to ever continue working as a ninja. He exercised twice as hard every day to be able to move around his mass of flesh. He figured out ways to make his weight work for him as a ninja, rather than slow him down.

  He had to spend a lot of his day eating, but he grew to love the taste of greasy foods. He had had such a strict diet for most of his life, and now he was finally given a chance to indulge himself. The best part was that his company paid for everything he ate, so he could buy whatever his heart desired, as long as it was high in calories.

  There were times when Basu thought the nano-poison was the best thing that ever happened to him. But, other times, when his heart felt like a lump of rusted metal in his chest, he wished the poison would just finish him off and put him out of his misery.

  After the taco cart was out of food, the other customers slinked away from the line. Oki saw their frowning faces and tugged on Basu’s uniform.

  “Look,” said the boy. “You made them all sad.”

  Basu grunted and walked the boy out of the mall. They went a few buildings down and then took an elevator up to a rooftop.

  “Where are we going?” Oki said.

  “I need to get you back to my company.” Basu looked down at his iKatana. The screen was frozen. He couldn’t even get it to reboot. “But we can’t go back until I get my sword cleaned of this virus.”

  “Oh,” said the boy.

  Then the boy said, “Why not?”

  “The Gomen will be waiting for us if we go back to my company.” Basu licked taco grease from the back of his hand. “They know who I work for.”

  “Oh,” said the boy, nodding his head.

  Then the boy said, “So where are we going?”

  “I know someone who can help,” Basu said. “She’s the only programmer I know who I can trust right now.”

  “Oh,” said the boy.

  Then the boy said, “Who is she?”

  “I’m not talking anymore,” Basu said. “You make my throat hurt.”

  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 ligh
ter 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.

  Chiya got right to work on his iKatana. For safety purposes, Chiya put her store into hover-bus mode and detached from the plaza. She wanted to stay on the move to make it harder for the Gomen to find them. Basu agreed it was a good idea. Her plan was to move the bus once an hour to a different side of town.

  While Chiya worked, she gave Basu access to her kitchen and he made full use of it. He pulled every bit of meat she had out of the freezer: three packages of bacon, six tubes of sausage, a bag of meatballs, and some ahi tuna steaks. He fried them all up in the same skillet, draining the grease into a coffee can that he put in the refrigerator.

  Basu wasn’t sure why Chiya had so much meat in her freezer. She wasn’t much of a carnivore. It looked like it had been there for a long time, as if she had kept it in there just in case he came back.

  O
n the two-seat dining table, Basu shoveled the greasy meats into his mouth from a serving platter. He had a fork in each hand. Oki sat across from him, watching with bemusement. The machine boy leaned forward in his chair with his chin in his hands, hanging on the ninja’s every movement.

  “How do you fit it all in?” Oki asked.

  Basu grunted at him with a full mouth of chewed sausage.

  Oki’s stomach started to growl within his metal torso. He touched his cold hard belly.

  “Can I have some?” Oki asked.

  Basu stared up at him. He chewed for a while and then swallowed.

  “Do you even need to eat?” Basu asked.

  The boy nodded. “Of course I do.”

  Basu angrily stabbed down on his mountain of meat with a fork, splattering grease across the table like a small bomb had just gone off. The boy sat up straight in his chair, wondering what he had done wrong. Basu pulled his fork out of the pile. There was a meatball on the end of it. He handed the fork to Oki and then went right back to shoveling food into his mouth. With one fork missing, he used his bare hand to pick up sausages and squeeze them into the side of his mouth as he chewed.

  Oki smiled at the meatball on the fork. He twisted it around in his hand, spinning it in circles as he nibbled around the edges.

  After Basu had finished eating, he took the meat grease out of the fridge. It had congealed into a white paste that he scooped out with a butter knife and spread on four slices of toast. He added cinnamon and sugar and called it dessert.

  After dinner, Oki and Basu sat on the couch together. Oki looked up at Basu. The size of Basu never ceased to amaze the boy.

  “What’s that for?” Oki asked, pointing at a hover-scooter in the corner of the room.