Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot

by Project Itoh

  “I gave birth to all of you,” Big Mama said. “For the Patriots.”

  From her womb came Snake and Liquid and all of their tragedies. Perhaps Big Boss’s corpse was a Pandora’s box. But considering Big Mama was the beginning of everything, then she was one too. If so, then what happened to the hope that was left inside?

  Maybe she’s the hope, I thought.

  “Follow me.” Big Mama waved Snake to follow her into the next room. “I’ll explain everything.”

  3

  IN THE BEGINNING, there was Zero.

  Big Mama started talking from there—with the man named Zero who was at the start of it all.

  She had once been known as EVA.

  It was only one of a number of aliases, but she spent most of her life under that one.

  EVA was a spy with many names, raised in the ways of espionage by the Philosophers, the group of twelve powerful figures from America, China, and Russia, in one of their operative training schools.

  She met Big Boss during Operation Snake Eater, as a Soviet agent sent by the KGB to assist him on his mission.

  But that was only a cover—she was an operative of the Chinese faction of the Philosophers’ post–World War II split. Her true goal: to acquire the microfilm, stolen by Volgin’s father, containing the only means to access the Philosopher’s Legacy.

  But in the end, she failed her mission.

  The Boss faked her defection to get close to Volgin, and put her life on the line for that tiny bit of plastic. She handed over the microfilm to Big Boss, and EVA stole it from him.

  But the film was a forgery. Afraid of reprisals from the Chinese government, the triple agent fled to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War.

  So who ended up with the Philosopher’s Legacy?

  The man who had founded and led the CIA’s experimental special forces unit FOX—the man who was given charge of Operation Snake Eater.

  He was a former member of the British SAS alongside The Boss. He was known as Zero. When he first met Big Boss, his rank was major. Like EVA, he had many names—among them Major Tom, David Oh—but most called him Zero.

  Then it was born.

  With the enormous fortune of the Philosophers in hand, Zero brought into being a new organization to follow in the legacy of the legendary hero, The Boss. The other founding members were Mr. Sigint, Para-Medic, Big Boss—with Zero, the four core members of the FOX unit—and a young man who had infiltrated the GRU to get to Colonel Volgin and covertly help Zero. Ocelot.

  They called themselves the Patriots.

  EVA joined them when Ocelot helped her out of a dangerous situation in Hanoi. They revealed to her their purpose: to unite a world divided between East and West, Soviet and America, communism and capitalism. A unity of thought and awareness, so that all might share the same one view of the world.

  The Patriots believed their vision to be the world The Boss had hoped for—a utopia where no soldier would be cast about by the changing times or have his life senselessly stolen. United, the Patriots shared in The Boss’s dreams.

  That had been the world she envisioned behind those sincere, yet sad eyes.

  With The Boss’s noble martyrdom, Zero felt a need for a new icon to propel the new organization.

  He made Big Boss that icon. Zero gave rise to new legends, some wildly distorted and more fiction than reality, and added them to Big Boss’s famed achievements. The great mercenary. The strongest warrior in the post-war world.

  But Big Boss wasn’t so callous a man that he’d accept those false honors without feeling he’d done The Boss wrong. It didn’t take long for the tiny fissure between Big Boss and Zero to grow irrevocably icy and deep.

  He left Zero when the man became consumed by a thirst for control. He didn’t desire power or money themselves, but simply pursued his desire to join all the people of the world to one single dream—and he did so relentlessly and to grotesque ends, reaching extremes of paranoia with ideas of universal monitoring and control, and power through environmental simulations.

  Big Boss couldn’t watch Zero distort The Boss’s ideals into a simple one-sided dogma.

  When Zero noticed Big Boss growing ever more distant, he started a new project in secret. Dr. Clark, known at the time as Para-Medic, headed the efforts.

  What Zero really wanted was another Big Boss, but the warrior had been exposed to radiation in his youth and could not father children. If Zero wanted another fighter with Big Boss’s genetic traits, he needed to create one outside the normal methods of reproduction.

  The project’s name was Les Enfants Terribles, and its goal was to clone Big Boss, the ultimate soldier. After dozens of failures, they finally, miraculously, succeeded in producing a fertilized egg—an imitation life born from somatic cells. EVA volunteered to serve as the surrogate mother, to protect the egg inside her body until birth.

  Her joy was to give birth to Big Boss.

  But the project would split Zero and Big Boss once and for all. When Big Boss learned of the births of his two copies, Solid and Liquid, he left America and, after years of drifting, founded the private military company Outer Heaven in South Africa.

  In this way, Big Boss declared war against Zero—and any who would twist The Boss’s “joy” into an appalling dogma.

  One wish, two interpretations.

  Everything stemmed from that. One thought order and control were all, and he grew obsessed with exercising total control. He amassed a fortune through countless wars. His words influenced decision-making all the way up to the Oval Office. He believed people’s inner selves could be governed by an outer force—the System.

  The other was angered by the obsession with limitless control, a vision far remote from what had once drawn them together. He launched a battle against the would-be global control.

  At the end of the Cold War, this second cold war broke out.

  None knew of its full scope, and none could possibly comprehend its real meaning. This world, so out of phase with our own, could only barely be perceived by slightly shifting the meaning to each war, conflict, and incident.

  Big Boss’s battle was put down by none other than his own son. After he was defeated by Solid Snake, a man with his own genes, Zero recovered his battered body. Big Boss had once been the icon of Zero’s movement. He had once been Zero’s friend. The fallen man represented everything Zero had once believed in, as well as the inevitability of betrayal.

  Zero was no longer willing to place his organization in the hands of the next generation.

  He built four AIs—GW, TJ, AL, and TR—to be the final centerpiece to fulfill his mad aspirations.

  There was one more artificial intelligence, a core unit called John Doe, or JD, that regulated, monitored, and controlled the other four. Our efforts on the Big Shell resulted in the destruction of GW, but the remaining AIs continued to set forth the future envisioned by the Patriots.

  EVA and Ocelot began working to free Big Boss from Zero’s clutches. They enlisted Naomi Hunter, an authority in the field of nanomachine research, into their organization. They helped free Frank Jaeger, the test subject of exoskeletal research who lived a cruel existence, in hopes they could use him to kill Para-Medic, the head of the Patriots’ cybernetic exoskeleton research. And EVA and Ocelot prevailed.

  Ocelot infiltrated FOXHOUND, getting close to one of the Snakes, Liquid, and helped them on Shadow Moses. There, he killed Donald Anderson, the DARPA chief and the man at the core of the development of Metal Gear REX—also known as Mr. Sigint.

  Liquid had raised his army in rebellion and demanded Big Boss’s body in hopes that with it, he could do something about the genetic disease that afflicted his men, the Next-Generation Special Forces, who had been genetically enhanced with Big Boss’s genes.

  Of course, Ocelot had given Liquid the idea. Ocelot’s sole purpose was to use the island’s capture to kill Donald Anderson, and if he could get Big Boss’s body at the same time, all the better.

  But with
that mission came the end of Ocelot and EVA’s alliance.

  Ocelot lost his right arm on Shadow Moses, and when he grafted Liquid’s arm in its place, his body was taken over by Liquid. Now entirely alone, EVA had nearly lost all hope when Raiden came to her with GW’s data and gave her a new path.

  Among the data was the location of Big Boss’s body.

  Snake and Big Mama walked out the front of the monastery and into a courtyard.

  The rain had stopped. The stones in the courtyard were still wet, sparkling in the moonlight, and smelled of the rain.

  The fog had lifted and few clouds were in the sky.

  Big Mama walked Snake to the back of a van. Two identical ones, droplets still clinging to their black paint, were parked on either side.

  “They look like hearses,” Snake said.

  “This is his pyx,” Big Mama said, “his Holy Ark.”

  Slowly, she opened the van’s rear door.

  Seeing the figure inside, what Snake felt wasn’t anger, much less hate, but pity. He felt a sadness akin to despair toward the man, who even in his current state was considered alive.

  Big Mama stepped back. “His body is alive, but his consciousness is locked away by nanomachines. So technically speaking, he’s not really brain dead.”

  Snake had trouble appreciating the difference.

  Covering the body was a translucent black sheet of sealed plastic that seemed to Snake like a body bag. The man inside was without limbs—a sadistic sculptor’s idea of a bust.

  Judging from the missing left eye, and the shape of his face, he had to be Big Boss.

  The skin Snake had burned away in Zanzibar Land had been stitched together with skin grafts so completely that no seam showed. But his cheeks were deeply sunken, and his lips had lost their fat, taking the shape of the gums beneath. If someone were to slap a layer of skin over a bare skeleton, the result would likely look about the same.

  Medical equipment installed inside the van kept those skin and bones in a state of life. The dutiful machines regulated the breaths of the man who would never be able to breathe on his own again.

  Snake muttered, “Why did Zero keep him alive?”

  Why had he gone to such great efforts to cling to this body, the body of the traitor, the enemy who had hindered his great aspirations and the man he had grown to hate?

  With a sad smile, Big Mama said, “People need legends.” She looked past Big Boss and into some distant place. “Zero wanted to create a messiah. A legend that would never die.”

  She closed the door, and Big Boss was again shut away inside with his ventilator.

  As Snake followed her back to the church, he pondered his fate. Perhaps committing suicide would be a better end to his life than the eternal quasi-death Big Boss suffered.

  Meanwhile, in Nomad, Naomi had disappeared.

  4

  STANDING BEFORE THE altar, Snake tried to absorb what he’d just learned.

  A statue of Christ on the cross looked down upon Snake and Big Mama from its place above the altar. Blood flowed from where the crown of thorns cut into his forehead.

  I’m just like that statue. Is that what Snake thought as he looked upon it? A powerful symbol for the apostles.

  Needless to say, Snake wasn’t Jesus Christ. He hadn’t died for all the sins of mankind. Snake was just a living statue born from one man’s obsession.

  But Big Mama hadn’t fought on behalf of that faith.

  “You fought for Big Boss,” Snake said. “But what about Ocelot? Why did he join with you? What did he fight for?”

  “The same as me. Big Boss. He didn’t fight for the Pentagon or the Russians. And certainly not for Zero. Ocelot was dedicated to Big Boss. He idolized him.”

  When I think about it, Ocelot had a terribly complex role on Shadow Moses. He participated in the rebellion with FOXHOUND and was a spy for the Patriots, but his real goal was to outmaneuver the Patriots, bury one of their founders, and retrieve Big Boss’s body.

  But now his body was controlled by Liquid.

  Big Mama said, “We can’t allow Liquid to inherit the same sins that corrupted Zero—manipulating people’s minds for the sake of his own ego.”

  Just then, the sanctuary doors opened.

  Snake and Big Mama reflexively spun to face the intruder, a lone man in a buttoned-up trench coat and a hat lowered over his eyes. He looked like he’d just walked in from a noir movie. The resistance fighters raised their guns, a hive of bees ready to strike.

  But Snake felt something was wrong.

  The coat fell to the floor and the silhouette of the man crumbled and split off.

  The rebels yelled in surprise. I couldn’t blame them. The supposed man was really three small surveillance robots standing on each other’s shoulders, like three kids in a trench coat pretending to be a grown-up.

  Each robot was a black orb the size of a bowling ball with three long, slender humanoid arms. They shed their disguise and scattered across the floor and up the walls.

  Big Mama said, “Give,” and took a gun from one of the young fighters. Immediately she shot one of the robots on the wall. Then she moved her gun in one smooth arc and fired shots at the other two. The robots skittered around the room with infuriating dexterity, but within seconds after the first had fallen, Big Mama’s unerring aim finished them off.

  The resistance fighters exchanged troubled looks, some biting their lips.

  “Scarabs,” one said, “Unmanned scouts.”

  Without emotion, Big Mama said, “They’ve found us. We’re moving out.”

  Either this was a frequent occurrence or she was handling it gracefully so as not to rattle her men. Her reaction impressed Snake—now he knew why this woman who called herself his mother had so many followers.

  From the satellite image feeds and the density of wireless transmissions, I could see the PMC were quickly converging on the monastery. I told Snake they would be on him in less than five minutes.

  Big Mama headed outside to the vehicles. The resistance fighters were already preparing their escape. She walked up to the driver’s side of one and asked the driver, “Are they ready?”

  “As they can be.”

  Big Mama lowered her voice. “We’ll send the real one through the canal route. Get it ready. Hurry!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The Gekko’s cries rang through the air, and all eyes turned to the bright moonlit sky. The howls of man-made beasts filled the empty streets.

  Snake knew the situation was about to get bad. There wasn’t even time for a smoke.

  Big Mama called him over to a row of motorcycles beside a garage. Some already had riders warming up their engines.

  As she walked into the garage, she said, “We’ve got decoy vans set to draw some of our pursuers away.”

  At the rear of the space, a motorcycle slumbered beneath a tarp. EVA threw aside the cover. Dust flew off the plastic and danced across the beams of moonlight coming in through the windows.

  “She’s a Triumph,” Big Mama announced.

  The bike was a T120. Designed in 1959 and the first of the Bonneville models, it had retained a persistent popularity. Even in the twenty-first century, its parts were still sought for tuning. At one time, Auto Race riders, believing the Triumph engines would bring out the best of their racing abilities, competed over Triumph Engineering engines. A vintage bike suited Big Mama. Beauty and power combined.

  She rolled the motorbike outside and indicated the resistance fighters’ quiet, frenzied preparations with her eyes.

  “They’re all orphans,” she said softly. “As children, they all worked in arms factories, and when they grow up, they want to join a PMC. They seek revenge on other companies—the PMCs that killed their parents. Their pay goes to support their younger siblings. There are countless child soldiers in the PMCs.”

  Much like Raiden.

  What happened to Raiden as a child seemed to me the worst act one human could do to another, but that was only t
he very beginning. He was sent to America, where he joined the army. He was put in the Patriots’ fake FOXHOUND unit and underwent endless VR training.

  “Nowadays,” Big Mama said, “anyone with access to the net can get combat training. The PMCs distribute popular FPS games for free. Of course it’s all just virtual training. It’s so easy for kids to get absorbed by these war games.”

  In order to recruit personnel, the PMCs had to lay the proper groundwork within the culture. They needed a culture that raised children who were ready to leap into war. By cultivating that culture, they could secure the manpower to carry the future of their industry.

  “And before they know it, they’re in the PMCs holding real guns. These kids end up fighting in proxy wars that have nothing to do with their own lives. They think it’s cool to fight like this. They think that combat is life.” She gave Snake a hard look. “They don’t need a reason to fight. After all, for them, it’s only a game.”

  “It’s the war economy.” Snake’s face twisted with disgust. That’s not to say that past wars weren’t about making money. When kings and lords reached past their own borders, it was always about money. What Snake abhorred was the hiding of the seas of blood and the stench of rotting meat under a sterile cover. What they called an economy was really just war—same as always.

  The children had been blinded to the nauseating realities of war. The image of the battlefield became sterilized. The groundwork was being laid for a world in which all people fought in proxy wars.

  Big Mama spoke with a low, forceful voice. “Zero is the cause of all this. Defeating Liquid won’t change things. Unless we stop the Patriots’ System, the cycle will continue unbroken.”

  She stepped on the pedal, and the vintage bike roared to life, its engine humming and vibrating, a noise wholly unlike the creepy, unnatural roar of the Gekko. This was a real machine, rough-hewn and comforting. Big Mama beckoned Snake to sit behind her, and he did.