Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot

by Project Itoh

  Then the president gave FOX one chance to clear their names of the failed mission—and of the defection of their founder.

  To prove America’s innocence, they were to assassinate The Boss.

  Jack—under the code name Naked Snake—again infiltrated Soviet territory. The USSR’s first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, cooperated with the mission and provided FOX’s communication system. With the aid of KGB comm satellites, Jack returned to the site of the failed mission to kill the woman who had been his life.

  In a certain sense, to kill The Boss was to kill himself. The two had been inseperable. When the government ordered Jack to kill her by his own hand, they might as well have ordered him to cut a pound of flesh from his side and offer it on a platter.

  And if you’re wondering why Khrushchev and the KGB would want to help America, even covertly, it was due to a complex power struggle within the Soviet ranks.

  Khrushchev had been building a relationship of trust with JFK, the previous American president. When the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, the two leaders came to a chilling realization—global destruction was at hand. Both sides had already amassed great numbers of nuclear weapons out of concern for their own safety.

  More than just fine words, compromise and détente were a singular approach necessary to avoid the annihilation of the world. Their attainment would be difficult, but this wasn’t a matter of idealism, rather of realism—and survival.

  Yet in both America and Soviet Russia, many equated the concepts with weakness. Such people have existed in every age—vulgar voices shouting, Strike them down before they come for us!

  This was a new era, however, one in which war between the two countries would imperil not only their own futures, but the future of the entire planet.

  The man who engineered The Boss’s defection, Colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin of the GRU, firmly fell into the warmongering camp. A hawk, the colonel believed Khrushchev weak and that too much compromise with America meant danger.

  Volgin wanted a way to deliver Soviet missiles across the divides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to American soil—one that didn’t rely on giant missile silo complexes dug into the earth. He sought a mobile weapon that could be moved freely through Soviet territory, striking swiftly and decisively while hidden from enemy satellites. He found it in the Shagohod.

  Volgin had now acquired the aid of both Dr. Sokolov, the developer of the Metal Gear’s precursor, and The Joy, the legendary soldier known to the Soviets as Voyevoda (Warlord). In a remote fortress, he rushed completion of the Shagohod. But he did so without the funds of the Soviet army. Rather, Volgin paid for it with his own wealth.

  Snake infiltrated the fortress to rescue Dr. Sokolov and terminate The Boss, but once there, he found himself in the middle of an unconventional battle for control over those finances. Volgin’s funds had once belonged to his father. To state it more accurately, his father had stolen them. This reserve was known to few as the Philosophers’ Legacy, an unimaginably large sum of money belonging to certain members of the global intelligence community.

  Before the Great War, twelve of the most powerful figures in America, Russia, and China—collectively known as the Wisemen’s Committee—founded an organization called the Philosophers. The men pooled their money together to fund the reconstruction efforts that would be needed after the inevitable outbreak of world war. The likely core of this effort was an underground mail network, known by its symbol of three postal horns, created to compete with the House of Habsburg’s commissioned House of Thurn and Taxis, which itself served as the basis for modern-day postal service systems. Volgin’s father was in charge of money laundering for the Philosophers, and upon his death, he left the means to access those funds to his son.

  In short, Volgin drew the clandestine attention of many powerful players.

  With the Philosophers’ Legacy, he constructed a fortress in remote Groznyj Grad, where he stationed his own army and began development of the Shagohod. In a way, Groznyj Grad was its own empire located within Soviet borders, and Volgin was its ruler.

  His actions weren’t entirely unprecedented. A commander named Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who had pushed for the industrialization of the military and was instrumental in the development of several advanced ideas on military strategy, once raised his own army in Siberia. Stalin feared his growing power and had him executed. Back then, a surprising number of officers throughout Soviet Russia had their own private armies.

  After Khrushchev’s failed agricultural policies brought hardship to rural areas, the hawks ascended to prominence in the Soviet leadership. Meanwhile, Volgin scooped up farmers from troubled soil across the territory and brought them into his army—paid for by the Philosophers’ Legacy.

  EVA, the woman sent by Khrushchev to assist Naked Snake, had been tasked by an unknown entity to obtain the stolen fortune. And when Volgin captured Naked Snake, he subjected his prisoner to cruel torture and interrogation, certain the man had been sent by American strategists to reclaim the Legacy.

  In the end, Naked Snake carried out his mission—the rescue and the assassination. He destroyed Shagohod and defeated Volgin. He killed The Boss.

  By his own hand.

  With hands The Boss herself had forged. With techniques she had taught him. With a soul she had imparted to him.

  After the long and brutal battle, she collapsed into a bed of stars-of-Bethlehem beside a lake. And when Naked Snake fired the killing shot, something inside him died. And something else was born.

  When EVA and Naked Snake parted, she told him about The Boss’s final joy, her desolate desire—that if she had to die for her duty, let her life be ended by her beloved disciple.

  Of course, that hadn’t been The Boss’s plan from the start. Her death had been part of a top secret op—so secret that even its instrumental player, Naked Snake, was unaware of it—to secure the Philosopher’s Legacy.

  When she captured Dr. Sokolov and defected in front of her own countryman, The Boss’s deception of Volgin was absolute, and she cemented the ruse with the gift of two American-developed small-scale nuclear warheads. But when Volgin fired one upon Soviet soil, the scenario changed.

  The Boss couldn’t abandon her mission—and her cover as a defected agent—without leaving the Legacy in foreign hands. But in order for America to prove its innocence in the bombing, she had to be killed. And if America couldn’t prove its innocence, the world would be consumed by a nuclear blaze.

  Therefore, she could never be allowed to return home. Neither could she take her own life.

  But even with all hopes dashed, The Boss never gave up. She accepted the responsibility that came with her gifts—to love someone, to fight for someone.

  She loved the world, this world in which we live. This world in which a few billion small and foolish souls live in a mixture of misery and despair. Those were the makings of the world she held dear. She possessed too much love for too great a thing; but she was so great a woman, with strength enough to bear that burden to the end.

  But nobody can carry the weight of the world by herself.

  As the events played out, her last joy was a prospect so sorrowful it couldn’t even be called a wish—for death to come by the hand of her own disciple.

  And on the far-off Russian lakeside blanketed with stars-of-Bethlehem, Naked Snake made her wish come true.

  Upon his return to America, he was summoned to the White House. There he met the praise of his assisting team—Major Zero, weapons and technology coordinator Mr. Sigint, and medical coordinator Para-Medic. President Johnson personally bestowed him with the title of Big Boss.

  “You have surpassed The Boss,” stated the president.

  Naked Snake stared at him, as though thinking, What the hell do you know about her?

  But he wasn’t angry. He had nothing left in him to feel anger. He had killed his own mentor; she was killed by her own disciple. Sure, there was a difference between killing a
nd being killed, but for two souls bound together so tightly as to be seamless, either was nothing more than suicide.

  Naked Snake lost a part of himself, and in its place remained only a void.

  The White House seemed distant, dreamlike. Snake regarded the substitute president as he would a wax figure. When Kennedy was assassinated by a former Marine in Dallas, this man was pulled up into the highest office in the United States like he’d won the lottery.

  “The trick is to keep the lid on,” said Naomi. She looked over Sunny’s shoulder at the frying pan.

  Sunny peered quizzically at the face of this woman who’d been suddenly added to the crew. A single rose in Naomi’s hair exuded an air of artificial beauty. A single blue rose.

  Naomi took a lid from the kitchen cabinet and placed it over the pan. The lid dampened the soft sizzle of the butter and oil.

  “Now let it cook for one minute,” she explained. “You like cooking, don’t you? Good for you.”

  “Th-this? It’s my Sunny-side-up fortune telling. When it t-turns out good, it means something g-good is going to happen.”

  I don’t know what exactly Sunny divined from her eggs. She never told me.

  Naomi leaned in. “So that’s why you don’t cook them over easy.”

  Sunny suddenly realized she hadn’t set the timer. She quickly grabbed the kitchen timer, a yellow cartoon duck, and turned its dial. To Sunny, cooking eggs meant timing them. It’s important to do things by the book—recipes exist to help make a delicious meal, after all—but when the guides become rules and rote, cooking loses all meaning.

  “The secret to good cooking,” Naomi said, “is to keep in mind who’s going to eat it.”

  Sunny tried to say something in reply but couldn’t find the words. Naomi looked around the room in search of a new topic.

  On the wall was a framed photograph of a young woman with short-cropped silver hair and willful blue eyes that gazed at some distant point in the night sky.

  “Is this your mother?” Naomi asked.

  “Y-yes.” Sunny stared down at the frying pan. Less because she was worried about the eggs than she was unable to meet the woman’s eyes.

  “She’s really beautiful,” Naomi said, meaning it. The woman in the picture was beautiful.

  This girl is like me, Naomi probably thought. She knew of Sunny’s loneliness. Both had lost their parents at a young age and were left alone out in the world. The child would likely never feel truly at home with her surrogate family aboard Nomad.

  Naomi turned to face Sunny, put her hand to her own hair, and said, “May I?”

  Without lifting her head, Sunny watched Naomi’s hand as it took out the blue rose and placed it behind the girl’s ear.

  “See, Sunny? We girls have to look our best.”

  Sunny blushed. She’d never received a flower from anyone before. Nor had she been treated kindly by a woman.

  “Her name,” the girl said, “was Olga.”

  At first, Naomi didn’t follow, and just said, “Hmm?”

  “My mother.”

  “Oh … I see.”

  Naomi and Sunny were starting to get to know each other, even if by baby steps. In just a little more time, I imagined Naomi thinking, maybe the two of us could sit around a dinner table with Snake and Otacon, like a family.

  But she knew that time was one thing that neither she nor Snake had.

  I won’t be there. I won’t make it to that table.

  Smoke came from the edge of the lid, and Sunny scrambled for the spatula.

  We pulled together whatever equipment we could find on Nomad to provide Raiden some makeshift treatment, but it wasn’t going to be nearly enough to keep him alive.

  Not that any doctor would know what to do with him, caught somewhere between man and machine. Carrying him to a hospital would only serve to inconvenience their staff. So we sat among our dark moods in Nomad’s cargo bay, powerless to help as we watched Raiden slipping away.

  Snake wasn’t faring too well either.

  He was reclined in a deck chair, holding an oxygen mask to his face like Michael Jackson, his aged body distressed by the thin air up in the mountains. The ability to rapidly adapt to changing environments belongs to the young, and personality isn’t the only thing to become rigid with age.

  Snake could probably have been on the oxygen treatment sooner, but until now, he’d endured to protect us from seeing him in his weakened condition. To break down his strong front, the climate and the battles in South America must have been incredibly severe.

  Putting up that front was his way of showing us kindness. And that kindness had become more than I could bear as well.

  Raiden moaned. Naomi and I ran over to the cot where his exoskeletal body rested.

  “Raiden,” I said, “are you all right?”

  He still seemed unable to move his lips. Instead, a computerized voice spoke from his throat.

  “Take me to Eastern Europe.”

  “What are you talking about?” Naomi asked.

  Raiden, only barely conscious, turned his neck a fraction of an inch toward her and said, “There’s equipment there that can heal me. Dr. Madnar. He saved my life.”

  What little strength he had was expended, and his head went limp on his pillow. Naomi leaned forward and reached out to caress Raiden’s head, as if touching the memory of her brother.

  I’d heard Dr. Madnar’s name before. Not a single engineer involved with robotics didn’t know about his career. Rumor was that he was working on underground cybernetic research.

  “We’re in luck, then,” Naomi said. “We’re going to Europe.”

  My eyebrows shot up.

  “What do you mean,” said Snake, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask, “by ‘We’re in luck’?”

  Naomi stood up, ready to explain.

  “Liquid is in Eastern Europe.”

  Snake and I looked at each other in surprise. This couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “And what’s he doing there?” Snake asked.

  Her next answer was an even bigger shock.

  “He’s after the corpse of Big Boss.”

  I practically shouted, “What?”

  Nine years ago, when Liquid’s group claimed Metal Gear REX and the stockpile of nuclear warheads, they demanded the legendary mercenary’s remains. Their goal was to analyze his genes and find the cure for their genetic maladies.

  The members of the rogue forces in the rebellion at Shadow Moses had already begun to express symptoms of their diseases. They—like the clone Liquid—had been genetically enhanced with Big Boss’s soldier genes, which imparted to them increased efficiency in battle and situational awareness.

  But now Liquid inhabited Ocelot’s body. Only Liquid’s transplanted arm still contained his original genes. In a certain way, he’d been freed from the curse of Big Boss’s genes that had plagued the three brothers.

  So why did he need Big Boss’s corpse?

  Naomi answered the question that was on our faces.

  “It’s the final key he needs to gain access to the SOP. The keys to the System are Big Boss’s genetic code and biometric data. Without them, there’s no way to gain access.”

  Then how had Liquid been hacking into the SOP?

  In the research facility, Naomi said the chaos had not been a failure, but a success. With her help, he had taken temporary control of the SOP.

  “What’s Liquid been doing all this time?” I asked.

  “In the first test, in the Middle East, he used the genetic code from his own DNA chip. In South America, he used the DNA code and biometric data extracted from Snake’s blood.”

  That meant the results of tests she ran on Snake had been transmitted to Liquid. With a sidelong look, I studied her face for any traces of guilt or reticence.

  It was Liquid’s facility, so it would only be natural that he keep her equipment under surveillance.

  But what if she had deliberately passed on Snake’s medical data? Was she here as
a part of Liquid’s plan?

  Snake lowered his oxygen mask and shambled toward us. On the way, he casually scooped up his pack of cigarettes from the desk. He lit one and drew the smoke slowly into the back of his lungs.

  “What’s the need for the original,” he said, “if a substitute works just as well?”

  “Neither your genetic pattern nor Liquid’s is a hundred percent match for Big Boss’s.”

  Snake coughed, choking on the smoke. “What do you mean we don’t match?”

  I rubbed his back until his coughing fit subsided, and Naomi continued her explanation.

  “There’s the markers implanted during the cloning process, the mixing of mitochondrial DNA within the egg cell, the deliberately altered terminator genes. Scientifically speaking, both you and Liquid are as similar to Big Boss as you could possibly be. But there are still differences.”

  Snake and Liquid had always been told they were Big Boss’s clones, born as reproductions of the legendary mercenary. But while it was correct that they carried Big Boss’s genes, those genes had undergone numerous alterations.

  Liquid had shouted it in the Middle East—We’re not copies of our father after all!

  Snake asked, “So that’s what Liquid was talking about?”

  Naomi nodded. “Which is why they created Solidus.”

  President Johnson, before his death at the Big Shell decontamination facility, described Solidus as a well-balanced masterpiece—one neither Solid nor Liquid. From what Naomi was saying, Solidus was a higher-precision clone of Big Boss. He was far closer to being identical to his father than either Solid or Liquid—at least genetically speaking.

  Solidus was born at the same time as his brothers, but he aged far more rapidly. Not necessarily because of the alterations to his genetic code.

  There’s something called clonal aging. The (supposedly) first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, was found to have shortened telomeres at her birth. Clones inherit their telomeres from the donor at the time the genetic sample was taken—they are born with cells that have already aged.