Epilogue: Never Be Game Over
A/N: Here's a presentation from the guys who sold the world to a bunch of computers with disastrous results.
Everyone has a right to pursue a happy life.
The difficult part is to be given that right.
Everyone has a right to pursue a happy life.
The difficult part is to fulfill that right.
I too have a right to pursue a happy life.
The difficult part is to work out a compromise for that right.
— Frederica Bernkastel
The next day...
After watching the climatic end of Return of the Jedi, it got the Games Club into a lively discussion before going to sleep late shortly after one o'clock. At the moment, Rika had a bad dream.
She dreamed of a hospital on fire with soldiers shooting patients and staff, of a boy with redhead wearing a gas mask floating through the walls and ceiling. A man on fire burst flames from his body while a patient struggled to crawl forward, assisted by another one, bandaged and wearing a green hospital gown. They had escaped harrowing encounters with a burning whale, the redheaded boy, and the murderous soldiers. It was so vivid, so jarring, so intense that the shrine maiden woke up with a start and a cold sweat.
In shock she woke up her friends and after a brief half-explanation got on their bikes to the hospital where Satoshi was interned, speeding their way through the three o'clock darkness where no traffic was in sight. They arrived at the town hospital where after hastily signing their names on the visitors' registry, where lead by the duty nurse to his room, guarded by Mamuro Akasaka.
"What's all the rush?" he asked concerned as the gang ran for him.
"Satoshi? Is he alright?" cried Shion.
At this urgency, he quickly lead them in to see Satoshi sleeping peacefully with an oxygen mask on his face and a saline drip on his arms. In the couch slept another plainclothes detective.
Shion ran and hug Satoshi, crying, knowing at least he was safe.
"Huh- what's going?" the cop asked, drowsily.
"Nothing, just a worried girlfriend," said Akasaka.
"Shion, we should try to move him," suggested Rika.
"Where?" she asked as she wiped the tears from her eyes.
"Someplace safe."
It was too early to followed on that suggestion but everyone agreed that such a measure would be discussed today. Akasaka had called for backup, putting the hospital on double guard for the next few days until Satoshi can be transferred to a new location. Rika wondered if she had acted rashly but remembering the dreams, she was no taking chances. Somewhere around the world it would happen. She wondered if she traded the previous world for this.
What was it all for?
Please do not deplore yourself.
Even if the world does not forgive you, I will forgive you.
Please do not deplore yourself.
Even if you do not forgive the world, I will forgive you.
So please tell me.
What will it take for you, to forgive me?
— Frederica Bernkastel
Donald Anderson, formerly Sigint, had been busy for three weeks in this basement, just another private research lab with a government contract for the development of an advanced communications system. This was a cold, dry cavern system appropriated to run computer research in the middle of the New Mexico mountains. Inside were banks of the latest Cray supercomputers built to handle millions of operations and enormous amounts of data per second. They were cooled by pipes of liquid nitrogen running through them. These supercomputers increasingly handled most of data from the Pentagon, the CIA, the White House, and thousands of government and private institutions combined throughout the United States, most of it without their knowledge.
The knowledge of this frightened Donald to the core as he realized about how much power he has at his fingertips at all the information held by the United States, from birth records to secret archives. But the very thing that frightened him most was his job as the keeper of a beast in its cage.
Zero's dream to bring the world under one roof made flesh. He was always asking himself if he should let it loose at the appointed hour, whether this was a good idea at all.
Ever since the Major was attacked by that skull-faced sonovabitch, he had been driven by his work. The bastard took a great bulk of Cipher's resources, starting with XOF, and went off the grid. A phantom that appeared and dissolved in black smoke, made even more galling by how so large an organization can disappear at will. It made the hunt for them all the more difficult.
But the worst sin to him was how the bastard took on Big Boss. Skull Face masterminded an attack on Mother Base in the Caribbean and sent him to the ocean. Such a thing was unforgivable as while they split over differences of opinion, he still saw him as that friend.
He owed the Major so much. Born on Veteran's Day 1939, the third child of a pilot who fought for the Spanish Republican Air force after he was turned down by the US Army Air Corps, and later being accepted to fill in the ranks of the Tuskegee Airmen, and a nurse who learned her trade and earned her spurs during the same war aiding Republican casualties, where his parents met at a hospital. He always stood out from his siblings and peers due to his interest in engineering in his home of Nashville, Tennessee. He created a homemade crystal radio when the family radio was broken and they were able to listen to programs with surprising clarity. He used to read sci-fi comics and followed the space race. He was actually impressed with Soviets putting Sputnik in space.
However, the future looked bleak for him. While not as bad as the Deep South, racism limited his opportunities and made worse by harassment by right-wing groups and the FBI due to their backgrounds serving on the Republican side. He joined the army at the age of eighteen in 1957, the same year Sputnik went up, which he thought was a good sign as desecration in the United States armed forces was underway and he needed money for college. However, it wasn't as he thought it would, forced by white officers in menial duties, which dampened his faith in the Army's promise of desegregation and the greater promise of end of racism in America. However, it wasn't all that hard for him as his skills in tinkering earned him some informal respect from black and white alike and in the process learned more about the people he was with.
He learned of Jimmy Wilson, a white boy from the Appalachian who resented the slurs made by others over his place of birth but is afraid of going back there as he feared he would end like his father in the coal mines, low pay, dangerous work, no future.
He learned of Jason Lamar, a streetsmart kid from the Bronx whose who learned a lot of race relations in New York's working class neighborhoods. His stories were hard-boiled and sobering reminders of the depths of ignorance, intolerance, and cynicism of human existence, yet a place of hope still exists in them.
He learned of Reuben Bernstein, a sergeant who as a kid survived the concentration camps of war and would tolerate no racism. It had brought him into conflict over another sergeant from the Deep South who constantly slurred his Jewish background and equating it with communism.
He learned of Albert Miller, an Alabama preacher's kid who wanted to have a restaurant in his home, where everyone is equally served regardless of race. He still held on to it despite his father being killed when the local Ku Klux Klan chapter bombed his church, the only casualty as he struggled mightily to save his congregation.
He learned of Freddy Jones, whose shortened his term of service so he can getaway from army life and join the budding civil rights movement.
This taught that the world can be brought together if everyone gets to hear each other's stories. In short: communication. He had been afforded the opportunity to go to night school where everything was more or less open and study electronics and anything related to communications.
Then after completing his army service and finishing high school, he still had no prospect, no way to apply his skills, no way to serve his country. That was until Major Zero came along, talent scouting for the CIA.
The Major listened intently to the young black man and his ideas and admired his spirit. They shared their belief in an information highway spanning the globe inspired by the breakthroughs created by the Major's countrymen in communications, decryption, and other related fields during the war. They believed it would finally bridge the gaps of the world, bringing men together as one. The lack of communication was one of the major reasons for conflict. Racism and nationalism are hindrances to recognizing true success.
His time in the army wasn't wasted as he got learn of the high-tech weapons and equipment developed by the CIA's technical department. But those thoughts had to be put away when they formed the FOX infiltration unit with the Boss, the legendary soldier, and Naked Snake. He and Snake got on together almost from the outset. Snake was a hell of a character, a quirky funny kind of guy who can be serious in the right - and times the wrong - moments. He seemed to like cardboard boxes and he was as wide-eyed as any like a fresh boot out of camp, in spite of his brief tour in South Vietnam were he trained some ARVN special forces and his his superiors considered that a quality eligible for his candidacy in FOX unit.
And he was hard man too. He survived the Bikini Atoll test only at the cost of his ability to have children whereas others developed symptoms like cancer.
With him they had helped stopped a madman named Volgin from heating up the Cold War at Tselinoyarsk. Sigint's support had been critical in terms of weapons and equipment and someone to talk to, along with the Major and Paramedic, which in spite of the worst parts of the mission, never lost his sense of humor. But the success of the operation and the world was at the cost of one thing...
The Boss.
Snake had to kill his mentor at final stages of the operation. Everyone in the room with him knew what he went through. They spotted this turmoil during the awarding ceremony when Lyndon Johnson awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross and the title of Big Boss after surpassing his mentor. The whole thing, the revelation that the Boss never defected at all but continued the mission and when it went south all the way due to Volgin, had gotten Snake to kill her, it all tore him up.
They split ways with Sigint joining the Department of Advance Research and Projects Agency, DARPA, to help find a way to bridge the scattered supercomputers of the country together in a secure communications network. Big Boss attempts to find work as an instructor or hunting guide were shot-lived while Zero continued to work for the CIA, creating his shadow army, XOF, with the Skull Face bastard as its boss.
Then they saved the world again, at another location off the grid, at Colombia's San Hieronymo Peninsula, where they stopped a madman modeled on the Boss herself, who thought to break the bonds that chain a soldier to the nations that used them, leading the FOX unit and the Russian based there in his quest for revolution.
After that incident, their names were cleared but Snake sank into a rut that made him consider the option of changing the world for the better. And he answered his call.
Then one day in 1970, the Patriots were born. Joined by a Russian Spetsnaz cowboy and blond female operative from the People's Republic of China, they sought to create the world the Boss saw and envisioned into reality.
But they quarreled bitterly over how this was to be achieved. Zero, Para-Medic. and himself had chosen to use information to heal the rift and Snake, Ocelot, and Eva, chose to break the soldier's chains. But anarchy wasn't his thing. He had seen the anti-war and civil rights protests. He had seen the effects of the war in 'Nam. He had read all about the destruction and horror of the wars of the twentieth century. He learned of the Holocaust from Sergeant Bernstein and the voicelessness of Wilson in dictating his own life. And they had stopped the world from destroying itself twice. No, constant war would sap the planet.
No, information was the key to humanity's future but it could not be trusted to humanity itself. A super-consciousness was required, which would erase all the petty reasons for humans to fight and carry the burden of bringing people together. The Peace Walker incident taught them that. Coldman was right about humanity too weak make the great decisions, too narrow to encompass the scope of the world. Artificial intelligence would change the world.
It wasn't easy though for him. The Mansfield Amendments limited funding for military R&D, especially in 1973. Limiting research to short-term application, research and development in America suffered as DARPA was a major source of funding and National Science Foundation didn't make up the difference as hoped for. But it wasn't a problem for him due to the Philosopher's Legacy, the untold billions of wealth of the Philosophers, secreted in bank accounts around the world. It allowed them to focus on two things: computer development and genetic research.
Development in computers had a blessing in disguise: the Mansfield Amendment initiated the brain drain of experts and graduates in computer technology from the universities to private enterprise due to the lack of defense spending the in the form of contracts. These firms had found freedom in out-of-the-box thinking, producing some outstandingly innovative ideas such as personal computers and microchips. This allowed Sigint to outsource most of the development of the AIS. And they've made a lot of progress with geniuses like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But Strangelove was the best of them all. Her work had made tremendous strides in artificial intelligence but when she disappeared... where to?
Fortunately, they learned enough from her body of work to build the supercomputers, code-named after the presidents on Mount Rushmore. They were to be the model in which all decisions were to be made should the system go online.
On the other side of the coin was genetic development under Para-medic. This sort of thing put him at unease. They had cloned their own friend without his knowledge, something that was akin to being violated to Sigint and he truly felt worse for that, it's like treating him no better than a stud horse or a lab rat. Para-medic must have felt that way too but being a doctor, she buried her feelings under tons of work. Some of the people she dealt with really turned his stomach. Her Japanese assistant was a protege of a scientist who used his experience in Unit 731 to work for the US government. Unit 731 were the counterparts of the men who had done the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which cost the life of his uncle, and were never on the whole brought to justice like Mengele's ilk. She was on loan from the Japanese government and there two other women who checked on her. Takano Miyo, some officer from the Japanese armed forces with a haughty psychotic laugh and Nomura, probably a government spook, always, polite, vague mysterious. No doubt to him they were using Clark's work for their own purposes and he had told her from time to time to tighten up security in her work, which she responded that she'll do as she sees fit.
The other thing that bothered him was the vocal cord parasites, which Clark had down a lot for her genetic research, and then discarded. She felt her idea of discarding them was sloppy as Skull Face took all that when he usurped Cipher from Zero. And what sort of research would she gain from those nasty little bastards? Some wetwork job that can target DNA or something... It is for that reason that all Cipher facilities still under their control had some of the best NBC protection in the world and they double up on NBC drills periodically.
Clark also engaged in cybernetics, trying to give enhance and repair the human body by providing artificial limbs. Some of that work went under his department thus he cooperated with it.
And he though of Big Boss... What about him?
No doubt the events of the Virtuous Mission and Operation SNAKE EATER had changed him and the final nail in the coffin was the infection that was Gene, who warped his mind with an idea of a nation for soldiers, Sparta or Prussia reincarnated. He tried that experiment in Central America where they staved off Coldman's mad scheme. Still, he always held out hope that Big Boss, no, Snake, would stop and talk to them. Now, it's no longer possible with him in a coma at some hospital in Cyprus.
It was to be second time to where brought back together again and perhaps the last. Ocelot and Eva helped delivered Big Boss's body out of the sea and into safety. Zero provided the place of treatment. Sigint since then pursued all leads. And Para-medic... continued her work, as a form of mourning. Trying to make sure he lives on, in the sons they created out of him, whom he had disowned.
A knock on the door shook him from deep thought. He replied brusquely, "Enter." He was getting tired.
"Telex for you, sir," said a senior lab assistant as she entered the door and handed the coded telex straight from Langley.
"Thank you." He took the telex marked EYES ONLY and read it. In addition to his duties as DARPA chief, he had become the de-facto head of Cipher - Zero's Cipher. Now what did Langley brought to him today?
The report was unusually speedy and detailed in the light of their dwindling HUMINT assets as XOF continued to gnaw at them every time they take on them.
It stated a number of unusual events in Japan:
The disappearance of number of high-level officials, politicians, and other prominent personalities, whereabouts unknown. They haven't shown up to work at their side of the world.
The attack of the "Skull Men" where a several places in Japan where attacked by blade-wielding, ninja-like soldiers with horrible disfigurements that looked like skulls. Witnesses described the attacks as quick and particularly brutal, the devastated remains shocking them.
The burning of a small island in French Polynesian which the nearby local authorities placed on alert, fearing a volcanic eruption.
The disappearance of several patients from sanitariums throughout the country. Interesting of note was that some of the patients were Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors who were chronically ill and he had not been visited by their kin for as much five years, ten years maximum. Another were victims of the Minamata disease, the mercury poisoning of the town by private industry. To this day, many of the victims were uncompensated and the government response remains inadequate. The victims, Sigint, noticed had suffered the more severe effects.
Cipher in Southeast Asia reported of another network being co-opted by XOF as indicated by increased XOF presence, springing prisoners from gulags (termed "rehabilitation centers) in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They were also rolling up a previously unknown network that the report stated was based from Japan.
This was too much of a coincidence, so many places at once. By the morning, there's no way to hide it from the major news agencies. XOF is taunting him.
He at once burned the paper with a lighter, to leave no trace of the report here and after it turned to ashes left the room.
Walking from his office to the computer rooms felt heavy as each stepped echoed in the hallways. Another major test was on its way. He was making a decision. Up until now, the supercomputers were not used to their full ability, mainly storing data and facilitating communications. They have tested them frequently to see if they can automate functions such as coordinating the country's ability to go to war should the White House be nuked. Now here he was, at the threshold, contemplating as the moment he hits the button, he effectively handed over human destiny to four supercomputers working in one.
Staff where busy everywhere as they made last minute preparations for the test, in consoles and within the banks of processors. They were some of his country's brightest minds in the field of computers and programming, working almost nonstop in these sterile dungeons, drinking cold coffee, often subsisting on cigarettes, stale sandwiches, pizza, and donuts, under round-the-lock security. So much has been given to make Zero's dream - their dream - come true.
"Here to see the show, sir?" asked a senior technician, a whiz kid from CalTech.
"No, I'm here to start it," was the reply.
The CalTech man blinked his eyes twice. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, I want this fully operational." At this moment, he was thinking about it hard. Cipher's HUMINT network was slowly dwindling do to downsizing and the attrition they earned from Skull Face and elsewhere. The hunt for Skull Face was turning into a frustrating exercise. Moreover, Skull Face's plan with the vocal cord parasites and the Metal Gear technology he stole threatens the world and he would unleash hell on earth anytime he was ready.
He had to come up with a decision.
"It's not ready, sir."
Not ready? He wanted more time and more information but he had neither. He wanted to find that Skull Face bastard and wring his hands around the neck for trying to kill Snake and Zero!
"I know." He no choice. The time was now. "Hit it."
The technicians type in the proper commands and the computer began its magic, started by a code made out of ones and zeroes, searching for a phantom human intelligence was incapable of finding. He hoped he can find Skull Face in time before he strikes. He also hoped he can reign the beast in once it had done its work.
But the die was cast. He knew deep in himself that he effectively signed the death sentence of the world's freedom. And there was only one deterrent to that, one countermeasure: the terrible children, the sons of Big Boss. The only hope for the future lay in them.
They've created a desert and have called it "peace".
-quoted from Calgacus in the Battle of Culloden(1964)
A/N: This chapter is an exploration of Sigint's relation with Big Boss and Zero just prior to the events of Phantom Pain and how they would influence his role in the Patriots AI's usurpation of human destiny.
