The Morbidly Obese Ninja by Carlton Mellick III Page A

grunted as he leaned over a dead body and ripped a sleeve from its shoulder, revealing a tattoo of a smiley-faced teardrop. It was the Gomen company logo. These ninjas he had just killed were not employees of the Kakera Corporation. They were Gomen corporate ninjas in disguise.
    Basu switched his iKatana to camera mode and took a digital photo of the tattoo. Then he went inside.
    The top floor of the building was filled with dead bodies. There were twenty, perhaps thirty, dead Kakera ninjas littering the hallway. It was as if they had had their last stand here. Their iKatanas were all fried. The Kakeras probably knew they had no chance of winning and set the CPUs on their swords to self-destruct mode before their final battle began. Basu didn’t see any Gomen corpses, so it must have been total annihilation.
    Basu shifted his massive weight from side to side. He took three packets of mayonnaise out of a pouch on his uniform and squirted them through his thick crusty lips. As he rolled the white goop on his tongue, he put his iKatana on phone mode and called his employer at the Oekai corporate headquarters.
    The phone picked up after one ring.
    “Moshi moshi,” said a raspy voice on the other end.
    Basu swallowed the mayonnaise.
    “We’ve got a problem,” Basu said. His voice was deep and soft. He didn’t speak very much, so his vocal cords were tender and smooth.
    “Tell me,” said his boss.
    “The Gomen knew about the piggy bank,” said Basu. “They beat me here.”
    There was a pause.
    “Go after it,” said his employer. There was no emotion to his tone at all. “This is a Class A mission. If you fail to retrieve the piggy bank you will be fired.”
    Fired was another word for executed.
    Basu grunted into the phone. Then he turned it off.

    Basu slid a small coin-sized disc from the bottom of the handle of his iKatana. The disc read iPet . When he turned it on, a plump green holographic frog appeared in his hand. It flicked its webbed feet and blinked its buggy eyes.
    Kero-kero , croaked the cyber-frog.
    Basu lifted the iPet to his face and frowned at it as if it were a fly that had landed on his cheeseburger. The cyber-frog stared back at Basu with a big cartoon smile.
    Kero-kero , croaked the cyber-frog.
    On the iKatana, Basu entered in the specs of the piggy bank, and then set the frog on the ground. The cyber-frog kero-keroed , spun around, and then hopped as fast as lightning down the hall.
    Basu flew after it. He passed through blood-splattered hallways, hopping over several dead ninjas. All of the bodies were ninja. No other employees were in the building. It was against corporate ninja code to kill the daytime employees, which was why the ninjas worked night shift.
    The cyber-frog hopped against walls and against the ceiling as it went. It hopped into a stairwell, and spiraled down twenty flights of stairs. Basu hopped after it, jumping down each flight, cracking the concrete under his heels every landing.
    They soared across a sky bridge and went into the next building over. On the bridge, Basu looked over the edge, down into the abyss below. It stretched dozens of miles down. He could not see the bottom.
    The next building was empty. There were no dead bodies here. This section of building belonged to a company that did not have a ninja staff, and therefore all employees had gone home for the evening.
    The cyber-frog stopped in a wide-open lobby with gray plastic couches and kidney-shaped coffee tables. It hopped slowly up and down, waiting for Basu to retrieve it. As he sucked the holographic frog back into its disc, he saw a familiar face. He slid the disc into a pocket and squinted his eyes to be sure.
    Across the room, through a glass wall, in a conference room, there was a man in a black suit surrounded by six Gomen ninjas.
    The Gomen ninjas were not dressed like Kakeras. They were in their usual Gomen uniforms: brown leather shoes, a tan face mask, and a grayish-blue collared business-casual