Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (17 page)

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.

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.