by Project Itoh
Solidus was born from the cells of a Big Boss already in his fifties. He wasn’t programmed with a shortened life span like his brothers—he just aged faster than them. Not an engineered fate, this represented the natural (or at least, expected) fate of any clone.
“But Solidus is dead,” Snake said.
“Listen carefully,” Naomi said. “This is the most important part.”
Naomi summoned a diagram on the monitor. The graphic was the outline of a computer network, which at a quick glance resembled the inside of a living organism. Functions of life might well have provided the basis of the security construct.
“The AI that controls the System employs a highly aggressive, advanced Intrusion Detection System, or IDS. By using a special code to inspect all data and commands circulating within the network, any data that fails to confirm is treated as a foreign object and expunged—like a virus killed by white blood cells.”
Think of a network as the blood flowing through an organism’s veins, with red and white blood cells and all the other essentials of life circulating within. The immune system watches for harmful bacteria and viruses hidden among the essentials and eliminates any material found swimming through the blood network without the proper codes.
The Patriots’ System was modeled after the human immune system. Attacking foreign objects required a method of distinguishing them from itself. The System needed to contain a self-definition—a form of code that specifies what it is.
Naomi continued, “The authentication program this IDS uses is based on a genetic identification program—one I helped develop for FOXDIE. It’s set up so that host commands only execute properly if the key matches perfectly.”
Should an intruder gain access to the Patriots’ network and inject rogue code, that code—without the proper genetic sequence—would be ignored by the System.
“However, if the IDS suspects an unauthorized user, the intruder’s genetic code is registered on a blacklist. That code is then blocked and can never again be used to access the System. So, with our substitute codes, we’ve had to use a new genetic access code with each of our trials.”
Snake exhaled smoke. “So when Liquid accessed the System in the Middle East and South America, those were only tests.”
When Liquid used first his own code and then Snake’s, the System initially accepted them as that of Big Boss. But upon detecting the slight variances within, it added them to the blacklist.
I took a long, deep breath to ease my nerves. “I can’t believe this—that Snake and Big Boss don’t have the same genetic code.”
“Strictly speaking,” Naomi said, “Snake and Liquid don’t have the same genes either. Which is why FOXDIE only affected Liquid at Shadow Moses … and spared you, Snake.”
That was a mystery that had puzzled Snake ever since the moment when FOXDIE froze Liquid’s heart, and Snake watched his brother sink into the snow. He could still remember that moment as if it had just happened.
“Why did Liquid die,” he’d wondered, “and not me? Weren’t we the twin Snakes?”
Now he knew why.
Now Liquid had only one option left—Big Boss’s true genetic code. Snake’s and Liquid’s codes were irrevocably on the IDS’s blacklist.
“Let me put it this way,” Naomi said. “If Liquid uses Big Boss’s genetic code—the original—he’ll have the System completely under his control.”
“Hold on.” Snake took the cigarette from his mouth. “I thought having his code wasn’t enough. You need his biometric data at the same time, don’t you?”
Big Boss was already dead.
Snake had killed him himself—in Zanzibar Land, the new country for mercenaries after the destruction of Outer Heaven.
Genetic code could likely be harvested from Big Boss’s body, which had been cryogenically preserved by the Patriots. But no amount of effort could restore his breathing, his pulse, or the flow of blood to his eyes. Particularly not when the man had been dead for fifteen years.
But Naomi hadn’t run out of revelations. Plainly, she stated, “No. He’s alive.”
What could we say to that?
Big Boss was alive. But Snake was supposed to have killed his father—no, his original—in Zanzibar Land.
The man—who Snake had just thought to be some war-crazed lunatic—told him he was his father.
Snake stood beside the fallen fighter and watched him die. In a certain way, he watched himself die.
“Big Boss is alive?” Snake said. “Ridiculous.”
“His body is. Or rather … his cells. He’s a brain-dead shell sustained in a lab.”
I guess that could be called living.
I glanced at Raiden lying on the medical bed. Most of his body had been replaced with a strengthened exoskeleton. The blood that flowed through him wasn’t red. But although he’d lost his body, he still had his mind. And if that could be called living, could I say that Big Boss, with his mind dead but his body alive, was really dead?
Perhaps that was nothing more than a problem of definition—a nebulous boundary between the phenomena of life and death. Whatever the case, if the System acknowledged the code, Big Boss was alive as far as Liquid was concerned.
The concept of life means different things to different people in different places.
“Liquid has already left for Europe in search of Big Boss’s body. Even from the start, he never expected his experiment in South America to work. If he obtains the body, he’ll be primed to make his final move.”
If the Middle East and South America had been rehearsals, this would be opening night. Liquid would take command of the System and control each and every movement of the vast array of military forces around the globe. We had to stop him, no matter how.
Snake and I looked at each other. Snake’s eyes held the same resolve as mine. The battle in Eastern Europe could be our last.
The trip to the other side of the world was a long one.
From America to the Middle East, from the Middle East to South America, and now to Eastern Europe, we went across the globe and back again, coming and going over the Atlantic Ocean. We—and Liquid in tandem—kept going halfway around the world and back.
The sound of wind rushing past machine. The sound of metal creaking under pressure. And lest I forget, the hum of the air conditioner. We were packed in between air and metal and machine.
Not that the trip was unpleasant. It wasn’t. Rather, we were like children in the protective womb. Snake and Sunny were asleep, recharging for the next day.
I, on the other hand, had much work to do to prepare for the mission. I built a list of information I wanted Colonel Campbell to have for us by the time we were four hours from landing. I took data from current maps as well as satellite and aerial imagery and constructed a 3D view compatible with Snake’s Solid Eye. Traffic reports, weather forecasts, language trends, network statuses, PMC reports—I needed to gather a great amount of information, and I fed it through an automated filtering system to extract the most useful data.
For my programs, sometimes I took snippets of useful open source code from the Internet, and other times, when I had to, I wrote them myself. Snake often joked about how he was blue collar and I was white collar. But white-collar work wasn’t necessarily easy work.
The maintenance of the Mk. II was my job too. Sensors, wheels and leg joints, the autobalancer, and stealth camouflage—I had a checklist a mile long for that demanding, but cute, little guy.
“Who’s this?”
Naomi’s voice startled me. I turned to see her standing behind me, her finger pointed at a picture on my computer screen.
“Oh, her?” The sudden question caught me by surprise, and my heart was beating a little fast. “That’s my sister.”
I had Emma’s picture on the edge of my terminal’s desktop.
The sister I hadn’t been able to save. The sister to whom I hadn’t been able to give my love.
The sister I killed.
I kept her p
icture there so I’d never forget. No, that’s not true. Of course I could never forget—but I wanted her image burned into my brain every single day.
Naomi knew none of this. Not about Emma. About my guilt.
“Really? I never knew you had a sister. For a moment I thought she might have been your girlfriend.”
Terribly embarrassed, I deflected my attention to the Mk. II on the edge of my desk, which only served to make Naomi even more curious.
“Ah,” I said. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
I reached inside the Metal Gear’s maintenance port and switched on the benchmark mode. The robot began its self-test sequence and started to bend and stretch.
“Emma was a brilliant programmer,” I explained. “She wrote the worm that destroyed the Arsenal Gear AI.”
“Where is she now?”
Where is she? I wondered. Wherever she was, our father was there, and even her mother too, acting like a typical mother. Somewhere, they sat as a family around the dinner table, and there I could call Emma by her name.
I hoped there was a place like that. I hoped she was there.
A place I hadn’t been able to give her. A place where I hadn’t destroyed everything important.
“She was murdered by Vamp,” I said. That was the simple truth of it, and I couldn’t find a better way to put it.
Naomi’s expression darkened as she realized she shouldn’t have asked. She turned away and said, “I’m so sorry.”
“No, there’s nothing for you to be sorry for.” I looked at her. “I’m the same as you.”
She looked back at me, ready to listen.
“I used to be an anime otaku,” I explained. I wasn’t being entirely honest—I still was one. But that was beside the point. “I was always fascinated by sci-fi anime. That’s what got me into robotics.”
Back then, I delighted in my work designing Metal Gear REX for AT Corp.
“But reality wasn’t so simple,” I said. “I never even imagined that my science—that my own research—could cause so much misery.”
Naomi appeared perplexed. Perhaps because my story was similar to the same sense of guilt she carried. I wanted her to know that I was the same as her—that she wasn’t the only one that felt a duty to atone for her wrongs.
“It’s not like we scientists are Satanists or anything,” I said. “But even when we have the best of intentions, we end up being used by others for evil.”
Naomi just looked at me and let me talk. And I was able to meet her gaze because I knew we had the same guilt, and the same duty.
She drew her hand to the pendant around her neck and squeezed it tightly.
“Dr. Emmerich, I …”
As soon as she spoke, all my embarrassment flooded back. I sought refuge in the Mk. II, pretending to work on its preparations.
“You see this?” I said, changing the subject. “Sunny helped me build it.”
“Really? Sunny helped you?”
As if she were my own child and I her proud parent, I boasted, “We built it using top-secret docs and patents dug up from intranets at a bunch of research labs. She wrote most of the controller source code. To tell you the truth, I think she’s better at it than I am.”
Naomi released her pendant. Maybe she had taken an interest in hearing me talk about Sunny. Although now that I took a closer look at it, the object at her neck wasn’t a pendant like I’d thought—it was a memory stick. I chuckled to myself. If she was using computer memory as an accessory, she really was a geek.
“Sunny was taken in by the Patriots right after she was born. She never even met her parents. She’s spent her entire childhood inside the Internet.”
Naomi gave an understanding look and said, “That’s why she has trouble speaking.”
“Her home is the Internet. She can only look out from the inside. She’s always in there, searching for herself. Searching for her family. She’s trying to figure out who she is and where she’s going.”
Naomi quietly listened to me talk—perhaps she saw herself in Sunny just as she’d seen herself in me. (Although, Sunny wasn’t old enough to be burdened by any sins save for the original one, so the connection was probably different than with me.)
“She believes she can find the answers inside a machine hooked up to the world. She spends every day inside the net, exploring. For Sunny, this is home.”
“No,” Naomi spoke. “It shouldn’t be like that.”
I was a little taken aback by her seriousness. “What?”
“It’s time you let her go outside.”
My heart seemed to cower within my chest. I hadn’t expected to hear her say the same thing Snake kept telling me. She had cut straight to the core of the situation, but all I could do was pretend not to understand, and say, “What are you talking about?”
“She hasn’t even been born yet. She’s still in the womb. You need to give her a real life.”
Her eyes were grave. I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get away with playing dumb. I turned to face the cargo bay and spread my arms wide. “Sunny’s never shown any interest in leaving Nomad.”
It was the truth. Sure, I knew I was being overprotective. I’d admit it. But more than my denying it to her, Sunny refused to connect herself to the outside world. I didn’t know if it was because of her time in captivity with the Patriots, or if it was because of Snake and me, or both.
“Frankly,” I admitted, “I’m worried about letting her go out there.”
I was the one who was scared. I couldn’t help but worry about her being exposed to all the irrationalities of the world. I’d already lost my sister. I didn’t want to lose anyone else.
But Naomi simply smiled at me, as if to say, Sunny is stronger than you may think. Then she said, “I have a feeling she’ll do just fine.”
“You really think she’ll be okay out there?”
“That’s not what I meant. I think she’s got a good handle on her science.”
And with that, I was thoroughly lost from the conversation. I’d thought we were talking about whether or not I could let Sunny outside, but she suddenly shifted to our earlier talk about the sins of our science. Had we been talking about different things all along? Had we just assumed we’d been holding a conversation, piling one misunderstanding upon another?
I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose between my fingertips as I tried to think of what to say next.
“Sorry,” is what I came up with. “Go on.”
“Huh?”
I was lousy at changing the subject. Mentally kicking myself for my continued social ineptitude, I said, “You were about to say something earlier?”
Naomi nodded, but she fell silent. Perhaps she was nonplussed by the sudden shift in the conversation. That was probably why I could never get a woman.
Then she smiled and said, “Would you mind if I helped Sunny with her cooking?”
“Of course I wouldn’t,” I said, but judging from her earlier severe expression and the relative lightness of her question, I doubted that’s what she’d originally intended to ask. (That said, improvement in Sunny’s fried eggs would be a revolutionary bit of culinary news.)
I started to put my glasses back on, only to be stopped by Naomi’s hand.
The sudden sensation of the coolness of her skin startled me.
I’d always heard that women get cold more easily than men … was this what that meant?
Her skin was cool and delicate.
I liked it.
“Leave them off,” she said. “You’re more handsome this way.”
“You think so?”
Naomi’s hand guided mine back to the desktop, where I set down my glasses.
She stared into my eyes, but unlike when we were talking about our sins, this time I found her gaze hard to meet. The look in her eyes held a different meaning now.
Had she kept staring much longer, I truly would have fainted. Mercifully, she looked away from me and over at the military helico
pter stored in the bay. “Dr. Emmerich, is it okay if I sleep in there?”
“Oh. Um. Sure.”
Her lips turned into the slightest smirk. “Sorry. I know it’s selfish of me, but I’d like to be alone for a while.”
“Right. I understand. I’ll show you in.”
I led Naomi past the sleeping Snake and Sunny and to the helicopter’s side hatch.
Nomad’s cargo bay was incredibly large, but with the military helicopter stowed away, not much room was left on the sides. I slid open the hatch and moved aside just enough to let Naomi in. As she climbed up onto the waist-high floor, her chest brushed by me. There were only thin layers of clothing between us. An awkward moment.
She got inside the helicopter, thanked me, and said good night. The blockhead I was, instead of some normal reply, I simply said, “Yeah.” I wanted to do better than that, but I couldn’t think of the words. After a moment, I said, “If you get uncomfortable or anything, just let me know. I’ll be out there working.”
“Thank you.”
Now both of us were thinking of what to say.
I spoke first, still unsure of where I was going with it. “And …”
“Yes?”
“Call me Hal. Good night.”
Naomi closed the hatch. I sighed for what seemed like the umpteenth time that day.
The hatch suddenly slid back open. Naomi’s hand reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder. She pulled me toward her, and our eyes were barely an inch apart.
She wrapped her arm around my neck. I climbed in and shut the hatch behind us.
2
SNAKE LOOKED OUT the window to get a view of the European countryside, but since this was the last train, Eastern Europe had already slid into the gloom of night, and all was darkness.
What he did see was a brightly lighted billboard alongside the rail line. The ad featured a raven with wings spread across a backdrop of advertising copy. Raven Sword. An American PMC. One of Liquid’s, of course.
According to Campbell’s report, the local government had declared a state of emergency in the historic capital. A curfew was in effect, and armed soldiers—provided by Raven Sword—patrolled the empty streets.
