by Project Itoh
“Keep moving, Snake,” I said. “Head to the nuclear warhead storage building. There’s not much time left.”
“No, there isn’t,” Snake said, his voice heavy. Though I hadn’t meant to, perhaps I had sent his thoughts to his own body.
The FOXDIE virus Snake unknowingly carried had left both Decoy Octopus, who had taken on the guise of DARPA chief Donald Anderson, and ArmsTech president Kenneth Baker dead beneath this building.
Now that same virus was undergoing a terrible transformation. Within his blood, the viral signatures that detected Baker and Decoy Octopus were eroding.
As Snake exited the hangar and began to cross the snowy canyon that led to the warhead storage building, a thought came to me. Viruses, like influenza or HIV, could experience sudden mutations to withstand antimicrobials and medicine. As far as modern medical science had come, the viral variations numbered in the billions and trillions—surely one would slip through the net and continue to evolve, and survive.
Every virus evolved. Why would anyone expect man-made nanomachines to behave any differently?
No matter how careful the creation, how strict the parameters—only kill people with these specific genetic patterns, for example—once the virus was released into the wild, it would someday escape from the intentions of its makers. For viruses, that’s simply the natural way.
The researchers should have seen this coming. Men weren’t gods; we could never hope to control billions—no, trillions—of separate viruses. Taking the capability to suddenly mutate into account, the creation of nanomachine viruses was not a technique mankind was capable of mastering. An independent life-form, once beyond the expectations of its creators, could not be stopped.
The SOP could be said to be a virus with more hosts than any other. It couldn’t be contracted through the air, but with this many carriers, the System could someday evolve far beyond the Patriots’ imagination.
Snake walked across the field where he had first confronted the FOXHOUND member Vulcan Raven, a giant man with Inuit blood. The ground itself echoed with Raven’s dying words:
You are a Snake that was not created by nature.
In the natural world, there is no such thing as boundless slaughter. There is always an end to it. But you are different.
The path you walk has no end. Each step you take is paved with the corpses of your enemies …
He might have been right. Just as the shaman predicted, Snake’s battle had continued. Raven foresaw a new world created by a man-made snake. His memory followed Snake across the field and into the nuclear warhead storage facility.
I shuddered.
The hundreds of nukes kept here for disassembly remained in racks along the walls and stacks of boxes in the middle of the room, and not under a particularly close watch. Anyone who knew of this location could easily obtain the warheads.
But was that fear groundless? With the Patriots’ control of information, almost no one knew of the facility. For military reasons, the island had never been marked on a map. Unmanned weapons, like Gekko and Scarabs, hired from a PMC would provide sufficient security. Beyond the storage room would be another snow field, where two twin transmission towers stood like miniatures of the former World Trade Center, and across that, the entrance to the deep underground service bay where Snake once destroyed REX.
I spurred Snake on. With the frost-covered rows of last-generation warheads left untouched within these ruins, the space seemed to me a catacomb stuffed with buried relics of the Cold War. Snake walked straight through the room to the security door on the other side.
The gate had frozen over, still locked. Snake asked me what he should do, but I was already thinking of an answer.
Security is shut down altogether. He can’t release the lock without activating it.
He’ll have to go there.
There, he can log in to the security system.
“I’ve got it, Snake. My old office is close by. If the power’s on, you should be able to unlock the door from there. And if you check the facility records, we can find out REX’s status and who’s been in and out. You remember where it is?”
“I’m not senile yet,” Snake snapped.
He knew I was making fun of his strong front. I laughed at the expected response and said, “Just to be safe, I’m marking it on your map, Old Snake.”
By the time the young man noticed something was wrong, he was already too late.
From the hallway outside the lab came otherworldly screams. The walls were soundproofed, and the doors, governed by the Personal Area Network, were bomb-proofed and made of thick metal. The screams must have been unimaginably loud to make it into the lab and the young man’s ears.
And there was only one door from the lab to the hallway.
These days, scientists had to maintain the physical fitness and self-confidence of a lawyer or a pro athlete in order to keep their patrons. But this young man was an exception: lanky and without apparent regard for his health or allure. His hair was as frazzled as a bird’s nest, and he hadn’t bothered to shave.
He quickly scanned the room but saw no place to hide. Sparks flew from the door’s security panel. The door opened in a cloud of smoke, and a lone figure stepped into the room.
The figure’s silhouette was shockingly beautiful. But the young man couldn’t tell if body was even the right word. Any way he looked at it, the intruder was no normal man.
“A powered exoskeleton?” the young man said. “Who are you?”
What at first had looked like muscle was an exoskeletal shell with complex detailing running in all directions. The intruder was a cyborg straight out of anime.
The cyborg spoke behind a mask. “Where is my friend?”
His voice, strange, and clearly modified by some machine, echoed eerily behind the full head mask devoid of all feature save for a single, glowing orange eye.
But none of that mattered. The young man’s attention was focused on the long katana-like blade in the cyborg’s right hand.
Was this the source of the guards’ screams?
The young man stammered, “What … what are you talking about?”
The sword-wielding half man, half machine steadily advanced, backing the young man into the corner.
The young man was frozen, with nowhere left to run, when the cyborg suddenly stopped in place and slowly turned away. Another man, in a full bodysuit, stood in the middle of the room. His suit appeared to have some sort of body armor, but at least it wasn’t a powered exoskeleton.
The cyborg ninja cried out, his voice trembling with joy. “Snake! I’ve been waiting for you!”
“Who are you?” the man in the bodysuit asked. The cyborg had called him Snake, but Snake didn’t seem to recognize this twenty-first-century ninja.
“Neither enemy nor friend.” The cyborg’s voice possessed an unsettling tinge of intoxication. “I am back from a world where such words are meaningless. Now you and I will battle to the death.”
“What do you want?”
“I’ve waited a long time for this day. Now I want to enjoy the moment.”
The young man muttered nervously to himself, “What’s with these guys? They’re like something out of anime.”
The two men standing before him, their attire, and the words they exchanged contained no trace of reality. Only the terror of that blade was real. Only the unadulterated feeling: I don’t want to die.
“What is it?” the man called Snake asked. “Revenge?”
“No. Nothing so trivial. A fight to the death with you. Only then can my soul find peace. I will kill you, or you will kill me. It makes no difference.”
The young man, hearing the ecstasy in the ninja’s voice, ran. But his mind was so overcome with fear, he had only escaped straight into the open locker behind.
“Hah! Fine,” the cyborg laughed with a glance at the witless hiding job. “He can watch from inside there.”
“I need that man. Keep your hands off him.”
Snake emanated defian
ce, and the ninja drew joy from it, coursing through his body.
“Now, make me feel it,” the ninja said. “Make me feel alive again!”
Nine years had passed, but the lab hadn’t changed a bit.
The room had been untouched by the wind and snow, and went unexposed to the sea air. Only a layer of dust had deposited itself in the solitude. The workspace remained in the same disheveled state from the battle between Snake and the cyborg ninja, who was later revealed to be Gray Fox.
For nine years the dust had settled—on top of the work desks, the supercomputer racks, and the locker where I had hid—and now the stirred-up particles sent Snake into a fit of coughing. When the violent coughing showed no sign of stopping, Snake pulled out Naomi’s autoinjector and hurriedly pressed it against his neck. While he took a few moments to collect himself, I scouted the room with the Mk. III.
Much had happened here.
At a computer behind a glass partition, many times I had run calculations in order to strengthen REX and simulations for his walking algorithms. I built mathematical models and made modification after modification. I calculated and recalculated and recalculated again, until finally, one day, REX took its first step. I could never forget that day.
An incredible number of man-hours went into the formulae that maintained REX’s balance in motion—how the robot’s enormous parts should connect, how much pressure should be put where, how much strain the parts could withstand. A mind-boggling array of hundreds of interconnected operations comprised REX’s ability to walk.
When Snake had recovered, I asked him to lift the Mk. III on top of the workspace. The terminal’s input jack was still operational, and I jacked in the Metal Gear’s manipulator arm.
I probed the electrical system. Most lines on the island were still active, and I wouldn’t have too much trouble rerouting the necessary power. I started by restoring the lab’s lifeblood.
One by one, the monitors came back to life. The climate control exhaled for the first time in nine years and sent dust dancing into the air.
“This version is totally obsolete,” I said to myself. “This is going to take a little work …”
Using the password from when I hacked into the system to save Snake, I bypassed the security. As I worked, Snake sat on the edge of the desktop and glanced at the corner of the room with the locker, door still open.
Embarrassed, I said, “This room isn’t conjuring up any unpleasant memories, is it?”
“No,” Snake said, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the carpet where I wet myself as I cowered in fear still carried the stain. How could I not think about it?
“You saved my life,” I said.
Until this moment I hadn’t realized that I’d spent all this time with Snake never having expressed my appreciation to him for rescuing me from Frank Jaeger. I was profoundly grateful to have finally said something, and to have come back to this place, remembering everything—including my life—Snake had given to me.
There were a mountain of things I needed to thank him for before he passed on, yet amid the day-to-day struggle, I’d forgotten them all.
Snake, as if I hadn’t said anything, was absorbed in his own memories.
“Naomi hated them for what they did to Frank’s body,” he said, “but it was I who crippled him in the first place. She must have hated me too.”
Deep regret overcame me. Some serious introspection seemed required into what exactly I had expected out of her. And yet the sin I carried was so similar to hers. Our own technological creations had twisted the world, and we shared a common guilt.
And so, carelessly, I trusted her.
I said to Snake, “But she was only using us to atone for her sins.”
“So what?”
Snake’s response left me confused. “You forgot already? She betrayed you! She stole your blood!”
He shook his head. “If that was all, she would have been done with us in South America. Why’d she join us afterward?”
“Well, I …”
I didn’t know what to say. Snake’s observation was dead-on. Naomi had seduced me. She used me. Blinded by shame and regret, I hadn’t seen anything else.
“She has us come rescue her,” Snake said, “and then she turns around and goes straight back to Liquid. Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. It didn’t make any sense. If her goal had been to obtain Snake’s blood for the SOP, she could have escaped South America with Vamp. And I had trouble believing she’d boarded Nomad to plant some transmitter or bug. She might have come to kidnap Sunny, but she hadn’t done that either.
There were a great many things she could have done for Liquid’s benefit, but didn’t. So what was her aim?
Now it seemed she was back with Liquid.
I pulled the security access logs. The passageways had remained nearly empty over the nine years since we left the island. Now, just a few hours earlier, two others had come to the facility. I routed the security footage to the Mk. III’s flip display and showed Snake the two visitors.
Naomi … and Vamp.
“The beauty and the beast,” Snake said.
The hallway was dim, and the feed was low-res and filled with static, but the tall man in the long coat and the woman in the dress couldn’t have been anyone else. They walked down the underground passage to REX’s hangar. Into the Cold War gothic ruins entered the vampire and the beauty. I rubbed my eyelids, fighting back a wave of impatience at having been beaten to the facility.
We were late. Like always.
But this time, if we failed to catch up, there would be no future.
Not for us.
And not for the world.
Snake emerged through the unlocked security door of the warhead storeroom and onto another field of snow.
The raging wind sheared off the top of the snowpack and kicked up clouds of white. Visibility wasn’t even ten feet. So as not to get lost, I guided Snake with the Mk. III.
We passed between the twin transmission towers and onto a comparatively flat plain. Then I realized where we were: where Snake had defeated Sniper Wolf.
“Wolf,” I said to the computer screen.
The Mk. III’s camera showed only the blowing white snow, but this was where the woman I once loved now rested.
When I was in FOXHOUND’s captivity, she had looked after the island’s resident wolf-dogs. She was different from the rest of her group—she was kind to the animals, and to me. Maybe you’ll laugh, but that was enough to make me fall in love. At the time, Snake called it Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological tendency for kidnap victims to feel a sense of closeness or friendship toward their captors.
Whatever the case might have been, Wolf was the first woman I’d met in a long time whom I could approach without feeling scared.
Without evoking that despicable relationship with my stepmother that broke the bond between brother and sister.
For so very long, women scared me. Whenever one entered my life, my world came further unhinged.
But Wolf was different. She was born a Kurd—the name of her people came from the word for wolf—and to be born a Kurd was to live on a battlefield. She was raised fighting against Turkey and Iraq in the defense of her very existence.
Through the scope of her sniper rifle, she watched the battlefield, both a part of it yet at the same time distant. Perhaps I sympathized with her. Burdened with painful memories of my family, I too kept the world, and all its people, at a distance.
And here on this field I lost my first love in a long time.
There had been no avoiding the confrontation. Snake needed to defeat her, and Wolf needed to kill him. Neither had any cause to hesitate. I never even factored in.
If I mistrusted Naomi because she had reason to hate Snake, I guess I had reason to hate him too. He’d killed the woman I cared for. Of course, I’ve never even entertained the sentiment, but I’d bet there were more people who hated Snake for a similar reason than there
were fingers on my hands.
Snake never wanted to fight, but he lived with the consequences of his battles. Those he killed might have had people who loved them. People left with enmity and the lingering pain of having lost someone dear. Their revilement, viscid and rotten, worked into his being and refused to let go.
Perhaps their concentrated emotions were the cause of Snake’s age.
It wasn’t Snake’s fault. Snake had never asked for this.
No matter how many times I said it, I doubted the dead, joined with the gods and no longer with mortal reason, would ever understand.
Snake was a sacrificial lamb. He attracted the world’s ire, but like the lamb up for offering, the responsibility wasn’t his own.
Through the wind and the snow came sorrowful howls, as if the wolf-dogs were still in mourning after these nine years.
Did the dogs that gathered around her body that day still hate Snake?
I found that hard to believe. I hoped they didn’t.
I prayed the wolf-dogs had forgiven him and come to understand as I did; there had been no other way.
3
HIGH ABOVE STEEL frames intertwined in intricate arches, recalling a great Buddhist temple.
Or perhaps a cathedral for the Cold War, I thought. Though REX itself might have been, as Liquid had said, the demon weapon that ushered in the twenty-first century, the ideas and thoughts that birthed it belonged decidedly to the previous era. A ghost of the Cold War, the architecture of REX’s maintenance bay a testament to its nature.
Atop the platform as large as a sandlot baseball field, REX had once stood. When we were still working on the robot, catwalks extended from all sides of the sanctuary, surrounding it like a building under construction.
But now that space lay vacant, and the catwalks littered the floor where they had fallen nine years ago when Liquid raised the platform to take REX to the floor above.
The aboveground entrance room to the supply tunnel became the graveyard for my largest creation. To my astonishment, Snake had soundly destroyed that monster. Though he benefited from my advice and Frank Jaeger’s self-sacrifice, the victory could still only have come at the hands of the legendary hero.
