Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (44 page)

And now, Big Boss slept beside her.

Snake stood before his grave. In southern Africa and Central Asia, Snake had fought this legendary mercenary and won. How had Big Boss felt, seeing his own copy turn against him? Could he have kept his head in battle, when the face of the man trying to kill him had once been his own?

But Snake and Liquid’s fight had been similar. Aside from a genetic marker, the two clones shared the same genes. In the end, perhaps Snake had only traced Big Boss’s life. As Big Boss killed The Boss, Snake killed his father in Zanzibar Land. As Big Boss faced his clone in battle, Snake had fought Liquid. And the fulfilment of Big Boss’s desires to free the world from the confines of prediction and control came by the hands of none other than Snake himself.

Snake offered a bouquet to Big Boss’s gravestone.

To the fight he’d passed down to his sons.

You are to infiltrate the enemy fortress Outer Heaven, then destroy their final weapon Metal Gear.
That mission, given to him upon joining FOXHOUND, must have come from the Patriots—no, from the machinations of Zero. Zero sent Big Boss’s own clones against him. The spite beneath this act was now as clear as day.

This was the form taken by Zero’s deep, seething hatred toward the comrade who had betrayed him; a twisted declaration of victory:
If I want to, I can create you
.

But in the end, all three Snakes created by the Patriots turned against their creators.

Snake had to wonder: if he remained, would history repeat itself again?

But that wouldn’t happen. Snake had come here to end his life.

Snake lifted the hem of his suit jacket and withdrew the pistol from his waistband. He pulled open the action and confirmed the round in the chamber. Then, as if in prayer, he kneeled before Big Boss’s gravestone and thrust the barrel into his open mouth.

The gun was terribly heavy. His hand trembled for more reasons than fear alone, as keeping an object that heavy in his mouth was a grueling task.

Snake may have spent more of his life holding a gun than not. In not one day since he first killed another man in the Iraq War had a gun ever felt light in his hands. Not the difference in heaviness noted from one specific firearm to the next, but the
weight
brought on by the gravity of the weapon’s nature as an implement for killing and for war.

Perhaps the soldiers under the SOP hadn’t felt that weight; the System had whisked it all away. But the Patriots’ destruction signaled the end of the era of war without pain.

Each time had its own wars. War has changed. Our time has ended. Our war was over. But Snake still had one more thing he must do; one last punishment he must endure: to erase his genes, to wipe that meme from the face of the earth.

This was Snake’s final mission.

Before he pulled the trigger, Snake spoke.

“At least I wasn’t alone.”

Nothing awaited him now. Snake feared going to a place of nothingness.

He remembered the faces of those who had fought at his side.

Emma, Mei Ling, Naomi, Meryl, Sunny, Campbell, Raiden, and Otacon.

“I can’t allow myself to harm their world. If my death will prevent that, so be it.”

His trigger finger tightened with conviction.

And finally Snake could pull the trigger.

I thought I heard a gunshot, and my muscles instantly tensed—though I knew the sound was only the cork popping out of a bottle of champagne. I became painfully aware that after my many years with Snake, the battlefield had worked its way into my very marrow—even if I had never been in combat myself. I sighed. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was a green-collar worker through and through.

A short distance from where the rest of the wedding guests drank champagne and celebrated Meryl’s day, I stood leaning against the white APC and drank my own glass. Sunny had taken the Mk. III’s remote controls and was playing with the robot, sending it scurrying around the runway—though she wasn’t watching the robot with the same amusement a typical child might. Her interest was in things like the Mk. III’s steadiness on one wheel—to discern the original coder’s methods from the workings of the auto-balancing algorithm—and the coordination between spatial recognition and evasion systems when presented with an obstacle.

A bottle of champagne in hand, Drebin walked up to me and said, “Nothing beats a stiff drink, huh?”

“I didn’t know you drank.”

“It’s not that I don’t like the stuff,” he said, the alcohol slightly edging into his speech. “Soda just agrees with the nanos better. The nanomachines break down alcohol before it has a chance to get you drunk.”

That meant that Drebin was drunk because the nanomachines’ control had disappeared, and the alcohol had been left unfettered to exercise its chemical effects. The time under the SOP must have been tough on the brewers and distillers of the world, their products having been stripped of their effects.

“So that explains it. No need for the nanomachines anymore.”

Drebin swished back another mouthful of champagne. “Yeah, well, it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. Lotta folks lost their entire sense of being the moment SOP went offline.”

Drebin was right. The effects weren’t just limited to the US Armed Forces and the PMCs. In militaries of every country introduced to the battlefield control system, vast numbers of soldiers suffered from physical and mental breakdowns. The phenomenon, known as SOP Syndrome, or SOPS, was not, strictly speaking, caused by the SOP itself, but rather its absence—the outcry of a heart left bare against the onslaught of war memories.

More than one in ten soldiers worldwide were affected by SOPS, making it the most widespread disease in recorded history. We had eradicated the Patriots’ control, but our actions had been drastic, with far-reaching consequences for human civilization. Getting rid of the Patriots wouldn’t solve all our problems overnight.

“To be honest with you,” Drebin said, “I’m not actually an employee of AT Security.”

“Huh?” I said.

Drebin glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. He spoke matter-of-factly, a common technique for those making a guilty and serious confession.

“The Patriots raised me to be a gun launderer.”

“The Patriots?”

“My earliest memories are of the Lord’s Resistance Army. You know, the LRA? A bunch of wanton murderers and rapists in the Ugandan Civil War. They kidnapped me, indoctrinated me … forced me to fight. You’re staring at a former child soldier. My parents, brothers, and sisters were all killed in the war. I was a war orphan.”

He traced his finger down the scar on the side of his head. The long, straight slash was likely a knife wound. Like Naomi and Jack, Drebin had survived the chaos in Africa.

“After that, the Patriots picked me up and brought me into the family business. I was Drebin number 893. There’s a whole lotta pawns like me all over the world. How do you suppose I laundered guns like I did? ’Cause they let me.”

Drebin snorted with self-derision. “In fact, I was under strict orders to back you guys from the start.”

“You what?”

I couldn’t believe how careless I had been. He had gone one-and-a-half times across the world, from the Middle East to South America, from South America to Eastern Europe, and finally to the Pacific Ocean. Snake and I had never bothered to question why this man had followed us over such a distance. We had just filed him away as eccentric. I scowled, less angry at his lie than my foolishness.

“Hey man,” Drebin said, “don’t take it personally. I wasn’t the only one under their orders.”

Drebin glanced at me, then to the newlyweds opening another bottle of champagne on the runway.

“Meryl’s unit?”

“They probably never realized it themselves, but …”

Drebin produced a piece of chalk from his cargo pocket and wrote on the tarmac: RAT PT 01. Then, a quick wave of his handkerchief over the writing, and the next moment, the letters had changed places.

PATR10T. This was a joke, but not the funny kind.

Apologetically, Drebin said, “You got played like a violin.”

“But … why?”

If we were fighting the System, why had the Patriots lent support to pests like us?

“Obviously,” Drebin said, “Liquid’s plot was a threat to the Patriots. So they planned to have you guys take care of it.”

Drebin spoke like he hadn’t had anything to do with it. I guess to him, he really hadn’t. He was green collar, enjoying the profits of war without ever participating in combat operations. He had watched our battle as a pawn of the Patriots, receiving orders that came down from a vague and nebulous above; a simple courier, a delivery man assigned to the principal players who would determine the world’s course.

“Only I guess it didn’t quite turn out how they planned, with you crashing their System and wiping them out and all.”

“Does that mean you’re out of a job?” I asked.

“Are you kiddin’?” Drebin faced me, arms open wide, legs entirely unsteady now, and touched his champagne hand to the stencil on the Stryker’s side. “I got the Drebins. All of the Drebins in the world are in on it. From now on, we’re in business for ourselves. We are pawns no more.”

I suggested he might want to take it easy on the champagne, but he ignored me and launched into a speech.

“The White House might’ve lost its taste for unilateralism and started to rebuild. But there’s a lot of failed states out there that went bankrupt from their PMC habits, and they owe a shitload of money. Now the only question is, who’s going to pick up the tab? I’m sure these new governments will try to keep it under control with PMC corporate reform laws, but it ain’t gonna be good enough. They’re all sunk up to their eyeballs in the war economy. It might not be a New World Order, but the old order under the war economy’s gone for good.”

Drebin was always a talker, but the alcohol sent him to a whole new level. For a moment, I considered that the nanomachines’ control hadn’t been entirely bad.

Drebin, who seemed to have forgotten I was even there, continued his monologue.

“I’m guessin’ the UN is gonna be more important than ever, what with multilateralism and all. Then again, the UN itself ’s just an old twentieth-century relic. And if you think about it, it ain’t that different from the Philosophers who went on to become the Patriots.

“A new war. New chaos.

“Then at the end, a new order. Whether it’s the UN, or some new power altogether, I don’t know. But it won’t be anything more than a new context for the world in place of the Patriots. Crush, mix, burn, repeat.”

I looked away from Drebin, who continued to expound to his own satisfaction, and turned my head in Sunny’s direction. She had handed the Mk. III’s controls to the island boy who had been watching the ceremony.

Yes, that was when you met Sunny. I can remember it now.

You were chasing around the Metal Gear, pulling Sunny after you by the hand. Nowadays, you take Sunny’s lead, but back then, you were the one who stood in front of her and ushered her into the outside world, even if at the time you didn’t know it.

I wonder what happened to the Mk. III after Sunny gave it to you. I don’t know if you can imagine my surprise when Sunny asked if she could give the Metal Gear to you, as new friends who couldn’t even understand each other’s language.