Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (40 page)

I thought that might not be enough to jar his memory. I believed my answer honest, although in truth, this was only one of my reasons for sticking with Snake.

As I’d expected, Snake seemed not to understand. “An … answer?”

“On Shadow Moses, after we laid Sniper Wolf to rest, and you started off to destroy REX, I asked you, ‘What was she fighting for? What are you fighting for?’ ”

The Kurdish wolf had fallen in the sniper battle on the snowy field. Standing beside her, the falling snow quickly engulfing her body, I asked those questions to Snake’s back. Never before had I witnessed two people fight to the death.

Why do people have to fight each other?

I had lost the woman I cared for, and as I cried, I couldn’t hold back that simple and childish, yet fundamental, question.

“And then, you looked over your shoulder at me and said, ‘If we make it through this, I’ll tell you.’ But we escaped Shadow Moses alive, Snake, and you never gave me the answer. I’ve stayed with you to hear the answer you held back.”

“Back then … I … I lived only for myself … because I didn’t want to die … My survival … instinct … gave me reason to live.”

“That’s the same for everybody.” That was likely true for everyone on that island—including Wolf, Psycho Mantis, Vulcan Raven, and Liquid.

I live; I don’t want to die yet.

To feel that sense of being alive, we had thrown ourselves into battlegrounds to be close to death. After the end of the Cold War, Liquid feared that kind of world would be lost. He led the rebellion at Shadow Moses in order to build a world by warriors and for warriors.

“You’re not the only one,” I said.

“I only felt truly alive … when I was staring death in the face.”

“And after we left that island?”

“I wanted to enjoy life … I really thought so.”

“The nine years with me, have they been fun?” Snake kept crawling, as flesh burned and fluids boiled.

“It’s like what Frank said … when he died … We’re not tools of the government … or anyone else … Fighting was the only thing he was good at … but at least he always fought for what he believed in.”

“I’ve heard you say something like that yourself, Snake.”

“Thanks to you … I’ve remained … true to those words … through every battle … Thanks to you … I’ve seen … my battles through … to the end … I’m content with that.”

After he finished speaking, it took me a moment to notice. Snake had reached the end of the seemingly endless corridor.

Steam and smoke rising from his body, Snake crawled out from the heat-ray hell.

The power-assist layer on the sneaking suit had frayed all over, exposing the inner material, the cloth stained red where Snake’s skin had burst.

I attached the Mk. III’s manipulator arm to the door’s security panel and opened the way ahead. Finally free from the microwave hell, Snake attempted to stand, raising up to one knee, only to collapse immediately under his body’s own weight. He fell forward into the server room.

Down on the floor, Snake vomited violently. He tried to inject Naomi’s nanomachines, but his arm couldn’t complete the motion.

I used the manipulator to press the autoinjector against his neck—just as I had tried to do on Shadow Moses, to deliver an end to the dying Vamp. Filled with those memories, I turned the Metal Gear’s camera to look around the server room.

“This is GW,” I said.

The room was a graveyard.

Tens, even hundreds, of black, burnished tombstones stood waist high in rows within a long, rectangular space the size of a football field. I felt like we had emerged into the Underworld. After further inspection, I realized that each tombstone was a server—although none shared any characteristics with my mental image of the servers I’ve used. None had even a single running indicator light.

With the quiet, orderly rows of ebony slabs, the room seemed less a server room than a cemetery, where the dead slept never to awake until their resurrection at the Last Judgment.

Before each tombstone, a cluster of pure white flowers waved, blown about by a breeze with no origin. They were holograms, stars-of-Bethlehem like those planted in the potter’s field where The Boss and Big Boss’s graves stood.

In a pained, raspy voice, Snake said, “Otacon … can you do it?”

The nanomachines had helped, but not much.

“Leave it to me,” I said and piloted the Mk. III to one of the tombstones. I lifted up the cover to a maintenance panel in the floor and inserted the robot’s manipulator into the access port.

Hurriedly, I searched for the best location to upload the worm.

GW comprised an unimaginably large system. Everything rested on my ability to find the right place to insert the first line of code. For that, I had less than a minute to search through the galaxy of information contained within GW’s exabyte of data. At once, I launched several crawler agents—my scouts—and handled the stream of reports as they came in.

If I transmitted the worm into the wrong place, days—or even weeks—might pass before GW’s ability to define and comprehend data would be completely destroyed. No matter how powerful Sunny’s finished version of the cluster might have been, if the worm took too much time to overwhelm the AI, we would lose.

Less than two minutes remained before Liquid would reestablish connection with JD and fire the railgun nuke. After that, Emma, Sunny, and Naomi’s stories would become meaningless.

Snake lifted his rifle and roared in pain.

He had sensed something. Even this near death, his senses hadn’t dulled.

“Snake, what’s wrong?”

Beyond the tip of Snake’s gun barrel, which he had somehow managed to raise, rolled a single black bowling ball.

The object glided toward Snake to be joined by others like it, rolling out from behind the gravestones. The black swarm came at Snake and the Mk. III, carpeting the ground, and extended humanlike arms.

Scarabs—the small, unmanned scouts that had attacked Big Mama’s base in Eastern Europe.

The carpet rose up, leaping at Snake, who remained on his back.

Snake squeezed the trigger, and the M4 kicked in his arms. His body, scorched, bled, and ravaged, no longer had the strength to handle an assault rifle. But Snake endeavored to protect the Mk. III from the Scarabs. Rubbery, jet-black arms grasped Snake, and in an instant, the bowling balls were all over him.

Somehow, Snake pulled his knife and stabbed at a Scarab at his side. The robot’s red sensor eye flickered out, its arms slackened, and it fell to the floor. The rest of the swarm, in unison, shot out electricity, the sparks stabbing into Snake’s body.

The machines attacked without mercy, striking at pieces of muscle and bone exposed by the microwave blowouts. I thought back to when Ocelot had interrogated him on Shadow Moses. Back then, Snake possessed the youth to withstand the pain, but now, his body cooked by microwaves, he struggled to remain conscious through these lethal shocks.

But if he fell, the Mk. III would be next.

“Otacon!”

As Snake released a deathlike cry

Sunny, Emma, and Naomi’s self-replicating story

eroded through GW’s core agent cluster.

In front of Meryl and Johnny, at the door in the CIC, the
Haven
troopers froze.

So did the soldiers bearing down on the armless Raiden at the entrance to the microwave corridor.

Throngs of Gekko filled
Missouri
’s deck.

Giant RAYs stomped through the wooden deck to split the battleship in two.

In an instant, the machines shut down.

“We did it!”

I read from my notebook’s display to confirm we had taken over GW. The self-replicating worm cluster had practically exploded through the system. The program overwhelmed the core high-speed information-processing sectors and deleted nearly all the program units.

The Scarabs fell from Snake’s body as if molting from his skin. The tiny robots had gone completely immobile and began to roll with
Haven
’s gentle sway atop the ocean.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

I looked at my screen. Something wasn’t right. I had set up a window to display the progress of the worm cluster’s spread through a mapped rendering of GW’s architecture. But the worm pushed farther than I’d anticipated. The program forced through every boundary and spread, like an insolent army, to every corner of the map, replicating with abandon.

“Is it removing the other clones?” I wondered, then rejected the hypothesis.

The worm’s territory extended beyond GW’s network. Not content with consuming GW in its entirety, the cluster reached its tentacles out toward the other AIs.

It can’t be
 … Naomi.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. As the worm expanded its influence, the display map of GW’s network zoomed out. A planet retreated into a solar system, then a galaxy, and onto a nebula.

The worm was expanding into the entire universe of the Patriots’ information network.

Noticing my unease, Snake asked, “Otacon, what is it?”

“JD is being erased.”

“What?”

Already the worm cluster had nearly complete dominion over JD. The self-replicating tempest overloaded JD’s central processor cores, destroying them. The AI’s highest processing core, in effect the Patriots themselves, failed. The worm legion engulfed the immense neural network.