Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (48 page)

You’re my hero, Uncle Hal
, she said. She pushed me. I remembered how Snake’s face got when someone called him the legendary hero. Of course, I wasn’t a hero either—just a man who happened to be at that place at that time.

Snake always joked,
You’re white collar, I’m blue collar.
As if spilling from a world put together so that everything was fate, a series of tiny coincidences brought me to Snake, and I followed him in his battles.

From here on you’ll be sharing your life with Sunny. As you depart on your new adventure, I offer you not words of congratulations, but only this book. I can’t be at your wedding, but if Sunny delivers this book into your hands, I think that will be enough for me. I’ve stuffed my thoughts into the lines within. I may have put in too much; if it’s a little overwhelming, I hope you’ll endure it.

Snake is gone now. Meryl and Johnny are off somewhere, fighting some fight just as The Boss had done—to protect what needs protecting. You know that war hasn’t shown any signs of disappearing from the earth, but even now, I still do what little I can to limit it. While you’re getting married, I’ll likely be trying to put out the embers of some conflict.

I have new friends and plenty of little Metal Gears to be my assistants. But Snake isn’t with me. The legendary warrior, the man who made the impossible possible, Solid Snake, is no longer part of this world. I won’t tell you in this book how long he lived after Big Boss set off on his voyage from that cemetery, or what kind of life he had. All I’ll say is that his last days were peaceful. He passed gently, simply falling asleep with a smile on his face. When I thought back to the days and nights he’d spent in constant battle, I found great solace in this.

Snake affected the lives of many. Some, like Jack, misunderstood and strayed from their paths, but in the end, Jack too settled into where he belonged. Any who witnessed the way Snake lived his life could awaken their inner strengths. He had that effect on Meryl, and even Colonel Campbell.

And ultimately even his father, Big Boss, was touched by Snake and found the forgiveness and peace he had for so long sought.

I already told you that you have a power, antithetical to that of the Patriots, to draw out the courage and the kindness within others. Perhaps what the Patriots did was more simply exercising control. But I bet you never even knew of their existence. The Patriots were incredibly careful never to let the people they controlled realize under whose thumb they lived. Like how a busy restaurant can provide chopsticks that are subtly more rigid, making the customers imperceptibly more uncomfortable and reducing the number of people who linger over their meals and thereby increase turnover. What the Patriots did was only an extension of such contrivances. You could say they performed maintenance on our environment.

The SOP was part of that. Militaries and PMCs actively sought out the SOP because the System was useful. Though PMCs under governmental contract were obligated to join the SOP, independent PMCs were not pushed into the System, but rather embraced it to improve their war performance and protect their corporate reputations. Once the SOP had become universal, those who sensed something off about the System and refused to take part in it would have no place to go—just as Johnny hadn’t been able to admit he wasn’t in the SOP.

The Patriots used this to repress the populace; to control the wild pack of animals from being let loose, to be able to act as they pleased. Such was the System built from a fierce distrust of the fellow man. The System wasn’t a discrete existence to be found in any set of locations—the System hid in the relationships and connections between people. That’s how that even after the death of Zero the System lingered, still able to keep the world under its control.

But Snake was different. He was not a system but one man, and by setting an example he changed many people. Including myself. I tried to express that through this book.
Just live. Live with sincerity, respect toward others, and belief in yourself.

Actions speak. That was precisely the kind of man Snake was. He stoically fulfilled his duty and brought change to the world.

I’m not going to tell you to live like Snake. That would be the Patriots’ way. Like how Jack had once been snared. But what I did tell you, through this book, was how Snake lived, how that affected others, and how the world turned out as a result. More than anything else, I tried to describe what his actions showed Sunny. I did what I could to express Snake’s thoughts and the feelings of the people around him.

I want you to know why, even today, so many people are fighting for the world you live in.

At the end, Snake thanked me, but I was the thankful one. I know my decision to follow Solid Snake was the right one. If I had never met Snake, I might still be merrily developing weapons, my eyes and ears closed from the rest of the world.

True, I suffered great loss after I met Snake—Wolf, Emma, Naomi. With their deaths I became trapped in despair so deep I thought I couldn’t go on living. As I wrote this book, nothing was harder than returning to those memories.

Still, I’m glad I met Snake. Through the days of our fight together, he taught me what it meant to be alive. And I learned that as you live, you etch your life inside other people.

People live to be remembered by others, no matter in what form. People die. But death is not defeat. For Snake and me, this is only the beginning. Even should our names become lost, the significance of our deeds will live on, passed like echoes from one person to the next.

That’s why I don’t want to forget a thing; not the happy recollections and not the painful memories.

Sometimes I think about how I wish I’d introduced you to Snake. You’re a lot like him. Through your strength, your strictness, and your kindness, you have the talent to be a positive influence on others.

Perhaps Snake was a blue flower, a man-made beast.

And even though he couldn’t leave a child, the testament to his life remains within many people. Jack, Meryl, Johnny, Mei Ling, and Sunny. Even this book I give to you is a testament to the man called Solid Snake.

After Big Boss died, Sunny and I went with Snake on his trip around the world—a world now free of the Patriots. To tell future generations of what Snake saw, we were witnesses attending to his last days. We followed him everywhere, no matter how exasperated his expression became.

Snake told me then, “I’m gonna be dead soon. You don’t have to come.”

But I insisted, saying, “You wouldn’t let me suffer Sunny’s eggs alone, would you?”

I wonder if Sunny’s eggs have gotten any better since she met you. The last time I had them, they were … okay. In them I could taste part of Naomi’s story, passed on to Sunny.

I wonder if you have to eat those eggs every day.

If they taste good now, not like the ones when she was eight, it’s because Naomi helped her. Naomi was only with us on
Nomad
for a fleeting moment, but a glimpse of her skill was passed on to Sunny.

Even atop the dining table, someone’s story lives on.

This world is an aggregate of such modest stories.

AFTERWORD

A NOVELIZATION. A book taking a story written as a movie, anime, or other media and changing it to prose.

“Will you do the novelization for
Metal Gear Solid 4
?”

To be entrusted with the novelization of such a monumental work was too great an honor for a novice with only one novel to his name. A newcomer might quietly undertake the job, receive the script, and dispassionately adapt it into a novel. A basic, sincere approach within the novice’s abilities.

But I had reasons that made such an approach out of the question.

I had been a fan of the
Metal Gear
series’ creator, Hideo Kojima, for twenty years.

Because I was a fan, I didn’t want to treat this like a typical novelization. I didn’t want to present a fleeting memory to be read and then discarded; I wanted to offer something that would remain forever on the bookshelves of whoever picked it up. I wanted a novel worthy of being read more than once. As Hideo Kojima’s stories held a special place for me in my youth, I hope that this ending to the
Metal Gear
series will be special for you. That’s what made this novelization what it is.

Perhaps I should have written shorter sentences. Perhaps I should have cut everything but the dialogue as much as I could. Perhaps I should have shortened the paragraphs and made it easier to read. As a reader, I’ve been under the care of novelizations like that. A rumination of the experience of the “real thing.” Since this book tells the story of the game as it was, perhaps I didn’t need to produce detailed descriptions.

But as long as the name
Metal Gear
was attached, I decided I wouldn’t let this be something merely peripheral.

Yet I didn’t at all want to make the novel special to myself by using the worldview and characters to assert myself through the narrative. How furious would I have been as a fan if some inexperienced nobody came in and asserted himself through the narrative and presented an original story with the same world and the same characters? Were it a famous, accomplished author, I might forgive, but someone new to the field like me couldn’t do that, nor did I want to or feel the need to. It’s easy to assert your ego through an “original” story. But I knew that the possibility of the novel lay in a place outside the story.

It was the choice to make Otacon the narrator.

How would the story be told? I know that a novel’s essence resides in that
how
. Moses parted the Red Sea, and Jesus turned water into wine. The soldier put his life on the line for the princess, and the little boy left on a journey.
Once upon a time …
In the past, stories didn’t belong to novelists, but to someone, somewhere. The passing down of another person’s deeds. From the likes of minstrels, tellers of lore, and the faithful apostles came many styles of storytelling to pass on the tales to the future world.

The method of the telling has as much meaning and importance as the story itself. Though
The Lord of the Rings
films are loyal to Tolkien’s creation, Peter Jackson’s presentations of the stories make the films distinctly his own. One might say that Peter Jackson told his own story through the way he told
The
Lord of the Rings
.

I thought the same might be possible with a novelization. Moreover, I thought that was the only possible avenue through which to make my novelization personal. I could faithfully tell the story Hideo Kojima painstakingly built without losing its emotional impact. A careful and thorough consideration of that method resulted in this novel. This is a book that stands complete on its own and can be read even by those who aren’t familiar with the
Metal Gear
series, and yet contains new discoveries for those who have already reached the end of the
Metal Gear
tale.

My long deliberation on the nature of novelizations produced a story informed by the meaning of telling the
Metal Gear
story—a story about stories, a story about what the
Metal Gear
saga is, what it symbolizes about the structure of the world we live in, and even an evaluation of
Metal Gear
.

Nothing would make me happier than if you took from this novel the meaning of passing down another person’s story. I hope this story will enrich your bookshelf and become a fond memory.

—Project Itoh
June 2008