Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (8 page)

With a voiceless roar, he lifted his Operator and stumbled into the courtyard. He pushed his way through the throngs of writhing and flailing soldiers. He fought against waves of overwhelming nausea. With saliva streaming from his mouth, he closed in on Liquid.

Suddenly, Liquid pointed straight at him.

Snake froze as if pierced straight through.

Liquid gazed down upon the courtyard in chaos and boomed, “Brother! It’s been too long!”

“Liquid!”

Liquid spread his arms in a theatrical motion. “Rejoice! We’re not copies of our father after all!”

Snake could no longer focus his vision, and now Liquid appeared as two blurry forms. Snake’s heart pounded, the palpitations threatening to burst his hardened arteries. With each beat, pain shot through his heart and his body.

Liquid pointed his right arm at the sun. “We are freed from the shackles of destiny!” He spoke as if he were pronouncing his victory over Big Boss, fate, and the world. “Snake! Brother! We are free!”

Something within Snake had been defeated. His legs refused to hold up his body. His knees hit the ground. His body submitted to the pain.

Liquid was still shouting. “I’ve surpassed my own creator!”

Snake collapsed to the earth. Even then he tried to lift his Operator and aim at Liquid, but he could no longer distinguish which blurry shape represented the man.

Then a pair of feminine legs walked into his vision.

The legs moved in steady footsteps—their owner apparently not afflicted by the chaos that struck Snake and the PMC soldiers. One step at a time, the legs approached Snake.

The world was silent, save for his own breathing. All seemed distant, dreamlike.

A familiar voice cut through the haze.

“Snake,” the voice said.

Snake realized that he knew her. He had killed her brother, his old comrade. Snake had first crippled him in Zanzibar Land and stood by and watched him die on Shadow Moses. He was given the code name “Fox,” FOXHOUND’s highest honor. He was Big Boss’s ally. Gray Fox.

Fox’s sister took a syringe out of her coat pocket and slowly injected it into her neck.

She was Naomi Hunter, the creator of FOXDIE.

Snake muttered, “Naomi,” but he couldn’t tell if he had actually been able to voice the word or not. His consciousness was slowly fading.

Naomi discarded the empty syringe and turned her back.

“Snake, if you don’t want to be a prisoner of your fate … then go. Fulfill your destiny.”

Snake reached out for her, but pain shot through the straining muscles in his arm and chest, and he collapsed again. By the time he could look up, she was gone.

On the roof of the building, Liquid was boarding a transport helicopter, with Naomi already seated inside. Liquid removed his sunglasses and looked down at Snake with naked eyes. His face might have belonged to Revolver Ocelot, but the resentment festering within those eyes was all Liquid.

Liquid flashed a smile and got in the aircraft.

Snake found his life flashing before his eyes. “It’s not just a saying,” he told me later. “It really does happen.”

In one instant he saw with complete clarity the events of his life. He began to slip beyond the plane of consciousness.

The Iraqi heat when he was a Green Beret disabling Scud missiles in the Gulf War. His infiltration of Outer Heaven, his first mission with FOXHOUND. When he’d grown tired of war and moved to Canada and was forced back into service to respond to the disturbance in Zanzibar Land. Shadow Moses, where he first met his brother Liquid. The tanker in the Hudson Bay he boarded on behalf of his anti-Metal Gear NGO. When he snuck aboard the Big Shell facility, home to the terrorist organization Dead Cell, led by his second brother, Solidus.

Somewhere inside Snake, a voice spoke.

Hasn’t this been enough for one life?

You’ve fulfilled your duty.

You’ve fought more than enough battles.

No one will fault you if you perish here.

It’s time for you to fade into the shadows of history, Solid Snake.

But Snake wouldn’t be able to forgive himself.

If he died now, he’d die a captive of his own fate.

Snake let out a deep roar from the bottom of his gut. He raised his Operator to the sky and blindly fired until no bullets remained.

“I’ll show you!” he shouted. “I’ll make it to the source of my destiny!”

As the last vestiges of consciousness slipped away from Snake, the helicopter disappeared beyond the city.

ACT 2: SOLID SUN

LET ME TELL you a story about another Snake I knew.

First, I’ll have to be clear—this young man didn’t carry the same genetic makings of Liquid or Solidus. He wasn’t a clone or even a designer baby. His parents were a normal, loving married couple who did as normal, loving married couples do, and he was given life as a normal fetus inside a normal womb.

He was forced to relive Snake’s battles—he was raised to become Snake. He was created in an attempt to produce another Snake, not through genes but through
memes
.

But he didn’t become Snake.

He rejected the transformation. He found his footing and decided to walk his own path, not Snake’s.

Because he met the real Solid Snake. Because he saw the other man’s battles, the other man’s life.

His name was Jack.

He was once known as Snake. And he was once known as Raiden.

We don’t pay much attention to Africa. By “we,” I mean most of the world. Even now, as I write this, the number of lives being lost there is staggering, and the widespread starvation is unimaginable.

More than half of the nations in Africa had an average life expectancy of under forty—a shocking difference when compared to our expectations of lasting into our seventies or eighties, with plenty of time for a comfortable life even after having raised children. But all everyone seemed to care about was global warming, endangered animals, or tomorrow’s stock prices. No matter how high the bodies piled, those with food, clothing, and shelter continued about their days unperturbed.

Jack was from that Africa.

The Republic of Liberia was born with the return of slaves from America. The founders of the nation based their new homeland upon the structure of the country where they had been forced to labor—a constitution and code of laws, a bicameral parliament, and a president who would serve as the head of the government. One way of looking at Liberia was as a doppelgänger of America.

But in the second half of the twentieth century, Liberia was gripped by a succession of civil wars. A dark rift ran between the native Africans and the Americo-Liberians, and poverty and hunger fanned the flames of a seemingly endless struggle for power.

Jack was born to one of the few white Liberian families.

At that time, the insurgent forces of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia were clashing with the government army, which was backed by the Economic Community of West African States. Factions among them shifted, splinter groups formed, and old groups dissolved, and the war even spilled into neighboring Sierra Leone. The situation devolved into chaos.

Jack’s parents were killed, and the young boy was kidnapped and conscripted into the rebel army.

He was forced to ritually chop off the arm of one of his friends as if it were a piece of kindling. He was indoctrinated to hate perfectly innocent villagers, given gunpowder to be snorted like cocaine, and made to watch
Rambo
again and again. In order for him to survive, his conscience rotted away. It didn’t take long.

Jack’s squad was called a “Small Boy Unit.”

Too young to know fear or the value of their own lives, they were able conscripts. Adult soldiers were burdened by too many values to have any hope of easily reaching the children’s grotesque, calm plateau.

Jack was haunted by the memories of this time—or, to be more honest, he ran from them.

He ran from the memories of the women, the little girls, and the fathers he killed with not a moment of hesitation, following orders.

He ran from the nickname—White Devil—that he earned through his fighting prowess.

With the end of the war, he was rescued by a human rights group and sent to America, where he joined the army and, eventually, the High-Tech Special Forces Unit FOXHOUND.

Jack focused all of his energy into his training and on a budding relationship with a woman named Rosemary. Through his pursuits, he ran from his past—from the casual slaughter prompted only by an order.

Some might say he had sought a petty and cowardly refuge in his new life, but for the first time Jack was able to find himself.

His first and only FOXHOUND mission was to rescue the kidnapped president from Big Shell—a marine decontamination facility and international symbol of environmental protection efforts that had been constructed to clean up the catastrophic oil spill left behind by the sunken tanker where Solid Snake was thought to have drowned.

When President James Johnson came for a personal inspection of the facility, a rogue counterterrorist unit, Dead Cell, seized control of the plant. The forces were aided by Russian mercenary forces and under the direct control of former US president George Sears.

Before given the code name Raiden for that mission, his FOXHOUND code name was Snake. The entire incident had been carefully planned to turn Jack into Snake.

From the terrorist stronghold in an isolated marine location to threats of kidnapping and nuclear attack, to countless smaller details, the Big Shell Incident was a purposeful recreation of the conditions Snake faced on Shadow Moses.

Believing that anyone faced with an identical story under identical circumstances would become Snake, the Patriots set the stage—they sank the tanker, spilled the oil, and built the cleanup facility.

Revolver Ocelot, along with Olga Gurlukovich, whose daughter had been kidnapped to coerce her support, worked as the engineers of this deception. Ocelot guided the former president—aka Solidus Snake, the “perfect” Snake—and his Dead Cell unit into an uprising against the Patriots, all in order for them to fill the role of FOXHOUND on Shadow Moses.

Behind the plot was GW, the command and control AI of Arsenal Gear, the Patriots’ giant submersible missile carrier that was secretly docked beneath the Big Shell facility.

Between his budding career in FOXHOUND and life with his lover, Rose, Jack had stubbornly kept his eyes closed and his ears plugged. He convinced himself he was following a path he had chosen. But as he fought the battle the Patriots had chosen for him, he discovered the cruel truth.

Everything he thought he had chosen for himself had instead been chosen for him.

He had only been running from his past.

Because Snake and I went into Big Shell “off-script,” we threw unforeseen wrinkles into the Patriots’ scenario, and Jack was able to learn the truth. He might have wished we never had. The knowledge must have been difficult for him to face.

But Jack was man enough to take it.

Jack defeated Solidus and drew the curtain on the play—which had been the Patriots’ plan all along. With their experiment successful, the Patriots announced the completion of a computer model.

The program had the ability to freely simulate stories—to recreate the Patriots’ interpretation of the truth. It was known as the S3 Plan—the Selection for Social Sanity. With it, the Patriots could manipulate reality. The transformation of Jack during the reenactment of Shadow Moses was only an operations test to test the limits of the program’s abilities.

But Jack hadn’t become Solid Snake—even though the test had been executed perfectly.

The Patriots’ AI told us that all of our sadness, our anger, our mourning were only byproducts—that our experiences off the coast of Manhattan had all been planned out by the Patriots.

But what was born within Jack wasn’t the Patriots’ story—it was Jack’s. It was Raiden’s.

But there’s a tiny little story inside each of us, and Jack’s refused to be a mere byproduct of the Patriots’ plan. That story held Jack up as Jack and no one else, and prevented him from becoming a soldier like Solid Snake.

Jack was once known as Snake.

It had been decided that he would become Snake.

He filled Snake’s role, and he fought like Snake.

But Jack kept fighting, even now, and he did it as himself.

Somewhere out there.

The smell of butter, oil, and sulphur.

Snake awoke. I was holding a plate of Sunny’s fried eggs under his nose. The two yolks looked like they’d taken gunfire, and the whites had burned black. The smell was the best thing the eggs had going.

I admit I have no room to talk, but no woman I’ve ever personally met has been a good cook. I’ve heard that even Raiden’s ex-wife Rose was bad at it. During our mission on Big Shell, Raiden let slip that he vastly preferred military rations to her cooking, so it must have been truly heinous.

And now Sunny too seemed to have fallen under my jinx. God must really be enjoying Himself torturing me with these women!

“Are those for you, Otacon?”

Snake put a hand to his head and sat up on the medical bed.
Nomad
wasn’t exactly a smooth ride, and the turbulence was a source of annoyance and discomfort. But Snake had slept straight through it until now.

“Yeah,” I said, taking in the broken yolks. “Sunny side up, only these suns collapsed.” I sensed someone behind me and turned to find myself under Sunny’s wrathful stare. “Oh, um, sorry. I’ll dig in right away, Sunny. And would you make some for Snake too?”

Snake threw a glance at me that seemed to say,
Thanks, leave me out of this
. Then he said to Sunny, “Hey … none for me.”

But she was already up the gangway, headed for the kitchen. Snake sighed and scratched his head.

“How long was I out?”

“The whole day.”

Snake rubbed his eyelids. His voice was hoarse. “Someone saved my life.”

“It could have been Meryl and her boys,” I said, although I didn’t know for sure. The PMC soldiers were wailing, puking, holding their heads in their hands, even trying to kill each other. It was hard to tell what was happening amid the chaos.

“Don’t worry,” I added. “They’re doing fine.”

But that didn’t seem to reassure Snake much.

Groaning in pain and with a hand on his hip, Snake arose.

“Liquid got away,” he said.

Suddenly, he began to cough violently. He put his hands on his knees and bent over, out of breath. I put my hand on his back, and after a short while, he recovered.

“Back there,” Snake said, “my body … just seized up all of a sudden. It wasn’t like normal. It wasn’t my joints or muscles.”

“It looked like the PMC soldiers all went haywire en masse. I thought it might be a form of an Active Denial System. But I didn’t detect any electromagnetic aberrations. You were lucky—some of those guys’ hearts simply stopped.”

Then Snake remembered the woman. “She was there. Naomi was at Liquid’s side. Otacon, did you see her?”

“No,” I said. Noting Snake’s disappointed expression, I quickly added, “But you’re right. Naomi was there.” I pointed to the syringe, a white autoinjector, on my desk. “I found traces of her DNA in that syringe you were holding.”

“So it was Naomi. Why?”

“Here, let me show you something.”

I sat at my computer and opened a file. Snake tottered over to look over my shoulder.

“Right after it all happened,” I said, “I got a video mail from Naomi. It was sent to my old address. The data checks out—no viruses. The voiceprint matches Naomi’s. And I’m fairly confident the picture hasn’t been digitally synthesized either.”