Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 film Akira didn’t just redefine anime—it was one of the main design forces that defined cyberpunk’s entire visual language. And no other piece of design in that film is more recognizable than the character Kaneda’s bike. Nearly four decades after Akira detonated into Western pop culture—and just as it returns to theaters in a restored 4K and Imax rerelease this September—that icon has finally been turned into a brick model worthy of the film. It is enormous. It is gorgeous. And it is exactly the kind of thing Lego will never sell you.

“The Kaneda bike is too violent for Lego, and they’ll never make this because of their family-friendly policies,” says Eastern Brick, the company that is turning the bike into a fully working, buildable Lego kit. “Cyberpunk themes are too realistic with their weapons and violence. We’re just fans wanting to build for other adult fans.”

They are right. The entire ultraviolent Akira universe is a transgression against Lego’s all-audience core values. Despite having a fixed no-gun policy, the biggest toy company on Earth will happily license Star Wars blasters, Marvel superheroes, Indiana Jones’s guns, and wizard battles by the container ship. Fictional conflict is fine because fantasy violence sells.

But the company’s own 2010 published guideline is unambiguous: “The basic aim is to avoid realistic weapons and military equipment that children may recognize from hot spots around the world and to refrain from showing violent or frightening situations when communicating about Lego products.”

The public doesn’t want military bricks either, which forced the company to cancel its sanitized, no-military-livery set of the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft after a German anti-war group targeted it because the real aircraft is used by the U.S. military. So it’s no surprise that Neo-Tokyo’s gritty, recognizably human violence—biker gangs, drugs, military coups—definitely falls on the wrong side of that line.

Which means anything Akira—like realistic military history, horror, and any number of adult subjects—didn’t even stand a chance of getting into Lego Ideas, the company’s line that turns fan-designed sets into real products.

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And, as always happens whenever there is a ban on anything, other people will appear everywhere and sell you the goods, like Al Capone did with whiskey or the cartels do with drugs. The appetite for adult-themed Lego is so high that it has fired up an entire parallel industry.

The industry Lego built by saying no

Here’s how the shadow market works. In brick-fan culture, an original fan-designed model is called an MOC (“my own creation”), as opposed to an official Lego product. An MOC designer does the hard part: engineering the model, testing its structure, refining its parts list. Then, a company packages the bricks and instructions and sells the result as a consumer set.

Some of these companies sell only digital instructions. Some source genuine Lego elements and box them into complete kits. And some manufacture their own Lego-compatible pieces—like a U.S. Army helmet from World War II or missiles for a combat jet—and ship entire sets without Lego’s oversight. Lego sells bricks to these fan companies in bulk, no questions asked. You can do whatever you want with them, as long as there is no Lego logo on the box.

The Kaneda Bike is the perfect example of the byproduct of the Danish company’s policy.

“The design was created by a designer, Clement. He’s been designing this MOC since early this year,” an Eastern Brick spokesperson tells me via email. The set perfectly captures the original design of Kaneda’s low-slung red machine—as iconic to cyberpunk as the Millennium Falcon is to space opera—as a display piece for adults who grew up on Otomo’s Neo-Tokyo. Its characteristic shape, basically a chopper bike with an aerodynamic fairing and a curved glass canopy, is all there. Even the bike’s rear engine works in the Lego version, with an articulated chain that moves its wheel. It’s made of about 2,200 pieces, the company says, and it measures 50 centimeters, or almost 20 inches long. “This is the largest futuristic bike for any sci-fi fan to build and display,” it adds.

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“We have a new upcoming Creator Set which we’re calling ‘Neo Bikes,’” Eastern Brick says. “The idea here is that you can make any style of 1:5 scale bike, but we will be starting with five specific builds that Clement has been hard at work on developing. We will reveal the actual designs soon.”

Unlike other MOC sellers, Eastern Brick uses alternative (“alt”) bricks—Lego-compatible parts manufactured in China rather than genuine Lego elements—and it sees itself as infrastructure for a whole class of creators. “EB is playing the role of making brick-building more accessible. We help designers turn their MOCs into sets that their fans can build with alt bricks,” the company tells me. “There are plenty of brands and designers designing what Lego won’t, because of various reasons, such as themes that aren’t aligned with Lego’s guidelines, like Cobi [another MOC seller] with their military sets.”

Merchants of the banned

The MOC-kit industry now spans an entire spectrum, from premium genuine-Lego packagers to full-blown alternative-brick manufacturers.

At the top end sits BuildaMOC, which represents the luxury tier. It sources authentic Lego bricks, boxes the parts and instructions for original MOCs, and pays royalties to participating designers. “We use genuine elements in every kit,” the company states on its site—turning fan models into purchasable, ready-to-build kits with the real plastic inside. MOCBoxing, StudBee, and MadeOfBrick operate in the same genuine-parts space.

Then there’s Brickmania, a company that has built a business exclusively on the military themes Lego refuses to touch, using Lego’s own bricks. “Brickmania has been the world’s leading producer of historical military custom Lego kits,” the company says, with subject matter spanning WWI, WWII, Vietnam, the Cold War, and modern military equipment. Its kits, it notes, “are comprised of new-condition Lego elements and quality products of our own design and select premium-quality, third-party suppliers”—including its own self-produced branded weapons and accessories.

There are also Lego clones serving these niches, the alt-brick manufacturers from China. Cobi is one of the largest dedicated Lego-style military brands on the planet, with an entire WWII range of tanks, aircraft, ships, and artillery sold as historical replicas. Blue Brixx ships compatible-brick military sets, too, including a WWII bunker with flak artillery, alongside modern vehicles. CaDA and MedievalBrick fill out niches from engineering models to fantasy and historical architecture.

Lego can’t chase these manufacturers with lawsuits. The patents for the core interlocking mechanism and internal tubes of the Lego bricks expired in the late 1970s. When I asked Lego about what they think about this alt-brick universe competition, a spokesperson told me that what is most important to them is ensuring that consumers are not misled.

“When they buy a Lego product, they get a product of impeccable quality that lives up to the strictest safety standards, which is exactly what they can and should expect,” the spokesperson said via email. “We welcome fair competition at any time. But if someone misuses our brand, IP, or consumers’ trust, we take whatever action necessary to protect consumers and our intellectual rights.”

Put it together and the catalog of the banned is enormous: realistic military hardware, adult pop culture, anime, religious architecture, dark horror, niche collector subjects—everything Lego’s all-audience brand can’t absorb, manufactured and sold by companies Lego doesn’t own.

Lego got a piece of the pie, too

Then there is BrickLink, the biggest MOC seller of them all. For years, it was the great unofficial marketplace of the brick world: a fan-built bazaar for parts, sets, and mini figures where adult collectors ran the show.

Then, in November 2019, Lego saw it needed to do something about that surprisingly large business and—oh, surprise—acquired it. “The Lego Group today announced it has acquired BrickLink Ltd. to strengthen its connection with its important adult fan base,” the company said at the time. Back then, chief marketing officer Julia Goldin pointed out that “BrickLink provides us with an exciting opportunity to connect with our adult fans through new channels and exciting experiences.”

Sure. But what adult fans also got was containment. BrickLink remains a marketplace, but now it sits inside the Lego Group and abides by Lego’s rules. Its Designer Program—a curated route where selected fan designs are crowdfunded and produced as limited-run official sets, “designed by Lego fans for experienced builders”—shows that Lego recognizes the appetite for fan-created, adult-focused builds. But only on its terms: its selection process, its production limits, its brand guidelines. Any theme that conflicts with those guidelines simply vanishes from the official pipeline.

Fortunately, companies like Eastern Brick and the others exist, so no matter how badly Lego’s Colonel Shikishima wants to control Neo-Tokyo, Akira always rises from the ashes to blind us with its brick-creating cosmic power. Soon, if all goes well, we’ll be able to buy the iconic bike designed by Otomo and perfectly captured by Clement in brick form. I just hope it comes with LED lights so I can race it at night across my home’s floor, screaming “TETSUUOOOO!!!” while my son screams “KANEDAAAA!!!”

A bizarre series of events in a college microbiology lab class left 33 people—including students, professors, and lab workers—believing they were exposed to a deadly germ. Of those, 32 began taking an antibiotic regimen as a precaution to prevent a life-threatening infection. Two also underwent lumbar punctures—aka spinal taps—after developing mild symptoms.

But none of them had actually been exposed to a dangerous pathogen, a fortunate twist in the strange incident, which otherwise stands to be a cautionary tale for the ages. The incident was published in a recent issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

It began with a simple laboratory exercise. The microbiology lab students were supposed to be given mystery bacteria by their instructors and then identify the microbe based on a series of biochemical tests and morphological characterization.

Unbeknownst to the students, the mystery bacteria was supposed to be Plesiomonas shigelloides, a common, non-scary bacterium. It infects a variety of animals, including fish, and has been known to cause diarrhea in humans. But it can be found throughout the environment and in the gastrointestinal tracts of healthy people, too.

To the lab instructors' great surprise, no one in the microbiology class identified their mystery germ as P. shigelloides. Instead, every single person in the class identified it as Neisseria meningitidis, a dangerous pathogen that can cause meningitis (swelling of the brain and spinal cord) and bloodstream infections, both potentially deadly.

N. meningitidis can spread by aerosols, and in laboratories, it requires specialized handling measures to prevent exposures. That includes respiratory protection and a biosafety cabinet, which is an enclosed, ventilated workspace that prevents the bacteria from spreading in the air. But the students did not have those things; they just had gloves and lab coats.

When the instructors checked the lab class's work, they couldn't find fault with their conclusion. They had all identified the mystery bacterium as a gram-negative, oxidase- and catalase-positive diplococcus with carbohydrate fermentation patterns all consistent with N. meningitidis.

An incident response ensued. University officials found that the stockroom freezer where the P. shigelloides was stored also, for some inexplicable reason, held a vial labeled N. meningitidis.

University officials determined that 33 people linked to the lab class had been exposed. They called in state public health officials, who quickly helped with risk assessments and sample testing, made public health recommendations, and helped with the investigation.

Incident response

The health officials recommended that all the exposed people start taking post-exposure prophylactic antibiotics for 10 days. Of the 33 exposed, all but one person started on antibiotics. Health officials noted that 15 of the 33 (45 percent) had gotten at least one meningococcal vaccination previously. Still, two people developed headaches and sought emergency care; they were given spinal taps to rule out N. meningitidis infection.

Several days later, the state's public health laboratory obtained two samples from the ill-fated lab experiment. They used mass spectrometry and whole-genome sequencing to conclusively identify the mystery bacterium: N. sicca, a nonpathogenic relative of N. meningitidis.

The state lab repeated the carbohydrate fermentation tests that the lab students had used to identify the germ as N. meningitidis. The state lab reproduced their results. They concluded that this odd N. sicca isolate was an "atypical carbohydrate fermenter" that threw off the identification, leading not only to the exposure scare but also to the original misidentification on the vial in the stockroom freezer.

While everyone was safe in the end, the class did experience quite a scare and underwent unnecessary interventions. State and federal health officials conducted a subsequent investigation to figure out how a thought-to-be-dangerous pathogen was stored in the same freezer as harmless bacteria for lab classes and how the two got mixed up.

"The investigation found inadequate inventory controls for identifying, labeling, storing, and segregating biological materials according to handling practices and containment conditions," officials reported. "Additional practice gaps included limited stockroom employee supervision, inadequate availability and use of personal protective equipment, and insufficient documentation of sample inventory, disposition, and chain of custody."

The officials reported that the findings prompted the university to overhaul their procures and protocols.

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