METAL GEAR SOLID 6: THE INFERNAL CONFLICT
CHAPTER 4— "THE GLUTTONOUS LIQUID OCELOT"
Snake had another strange dream again, similar to the one he had in Geneva.
He was restrained to a hospital bed made of alloy matching his endoskeleton.
The others were around him again.
"…despite nearly losing Ed, Jonathan, and Johnny in Saudi Arabia, we managed to steal back his body from Dante like you said to, Mikki. We would've been dead if it hadn't been for the cybernetic augmentation surgeries you performed on us."
"Good, thank god," Ultra Mouse said. "I'm sorry, Meryl. I know it must not have been easy."
"So, what was the point of keeping Snake in cryogenics, Mikki?" said Otacon.
"I'm curious to the reasoning behind this as well," said Naomi. "It seems eerily similar to the way Big Boss's body was stored and used by the Patriots."
"It's a long story," Ultra Mouse said. "I don't know all of the details of Dante's plans for him. Actually, I hardly know any. What I do know was that his consciousness was used for an experiment. One that was crucial to his plans for humanity, DICE. If you hadn't saved Snake from falling into the hands of Dante… it'd likely be too late to save humanity. I think we need to bring him back."
"What? Why?" said Otacon.
"If there's anyone who could bring Dante down, it's him. Not to mention that putting his preserved consciousness inside of a new transhuman body will make him stronger than ever before. He already had a strong will to live."
"But would it really be him?" said Rosemary.
"Rosemary has a point," said Colonel Campbell. "The Patriots may have made him a copy of Big Boss during the Les Infants Terribles project, but that copy was made of genes. Human genes. Snake was his own person. Now, he'd just be a copy of his former self."
"Meaning in reality, he'd technically be dead. Just like the rest of us," said Raiden quietly. "I don't like this at all."
"Mikki, are you sure this is the only way to save him?" said Meryl.
"I'm afraid so," said Ultra Mouse.
"I'm against it," said Raiden. "He wouldn't approve of what his mind is being used for. It'd turn him into the very thing he helped us fight against."
"You managed to bring me back the same way, though," said Naomi. "I was so close to being gone, but Otacon and Sunny managed to give me the will to live again. I managed to survive the explosion at Shadow Moses, and before cancer got the best of me... you managed to find me, and use the cryogenics at what was left of Shadow Moses to keep me from aging, and to keep the cancer from spreading. Maybe we aren't chained to fate like I thought we were. Maybe we can truly cheat death, prevent the end of the world. What do you think, Otacon?"
"I'm not sure. He always said he wanted to die peacefully. And keeping him alive would put him at risk of falling into Dante's hands again. I don't want to lose him, but… this whole thing just feels wrong."
"I see. Do you really think Snake, if brought back to life, could help stop the war economy, and bring peace to the world once again?" Naomi said to Ultra Mouse.
"I don't think. I know," said Ultra Mouse.
"Are you sure Snake would want this, Meryl?" said Johnny.
"I don't know. I really don't." said Meryl.
"Snake may not want to be brought back, but he's always believed in preserving the good of humanity, no matter how much it hurts him in the process. And right now, the world needs him." said the Colonel. "Your heart is in the right place, Meryl. Do whatever it tells you to do."
Meryl sighed, "All right. Bring him back, Mikki."
Ultra Mouse smiled, and said, "I'll get started with prepping him for surgery."
Snake snapped out of his trance, and woke up. He looked around him, and nearly fell off of the ledge he had stopped to rest on for the time being. He was overlooking a massive drop into the snowy depths of the Russian Altai Mountains below him. There was a massive snowstorm happening. Fortunately, Snake couldn't feel the cold anymore, otherwise even someone like him would freeze to death in temperatures like this.
Otacon said over Snake's C3, "Are you all right, Snake? Sunny's been monitoring your senses; your BISECT was in sleep mode to help pass the time while waiting for the mole to contact you about Dante's arrival at the A-Nile-8 manufacturing facility."
"I'm fine," Snake lied. "Why are you asking?"
"…because you woke up," said Otacon. "According to Sunny, the mole hasn't contacted you yet."
"I… just had a weird dream," said Snake.
"Was it the same one you always have? The weird blurry, pixelated one about Shadow Moses?"
"No," said Snake, "this one was different. But I had one similar to this once before."
"Strange," said Otacon. "What was it about?"
"Otacon…" said Snake, "were you and the others the ones who revived me before I died? And was I put in some sort of cryogenic preservation by Dante?"
"Yeah," said Otacon, "I thought you knew, though."
"It's news to me," grunted Snake. "To be honest, I'm getting a little sick of people keeping things from me."
"Hey, don't be like that, Snake!" said Otacon. "I'm not like the others. I haven't been turned by Dante."
"I know," sighed Snake. "I'm sorry, Otacon. I'm just becoming paranoid. Meryl and the others seemed fine too before they betrayed us. This all feels too horrible to be real, like another nightmare…"
"I understand," said Otacon. "Snake, do you really think we can bring them back?"
"I don't know, Otacon."
"I mean… they've clearly been brainwashed by Drakovich. Do you think there's a way to undo their brainwashing?"
"I don't know."
"All right…" said Otacon. "Just promise you'll try to get them back. Please."
"I promise, Otacon," said Snake. "They're my friends, too. I'm not going to lose them due to the schemes of a lowlife like Dante."
"Good," said Otacon with a smile over the C3. "Sunny and I will contact you later, Snake."
Snake sighed as Otacon's C3 disappeared.
Can I trust Otacon either? Thought Snake. I trusted everyone else before they… Stopping himself, Snake thought, no. Otacon has a strong will. Dante couldn't have turned him.
Snake's C3 chime rang again.
It was Ultra Mouse.
"Snake, come in," she said.
"I'm here, Mikki," said Snake.
"Good," she said, and smiled. "Kept you waiting, huh?"
"You sure did," said Snake. "My GPS says I'm practically right beneath the A-Nile-8 facility." Several planes just took off and flying into the distance, and the resulting winds sent some large chunks of ice falling not too far away from Snake. Snake said, "A lot of the planes are coming and going from the airfield. I assume they're for shipping out some products that were brought here from other companies... a lot of which are probably more of Firelake's subsidiaries."
"I know," said Ultra Mouse. "The noise might give you some cover to mask the sound of your movements—and shooting—but the crowdedness of the facility will make stealth more difficult, especially once you get inside."
Snake said, "Do you have any ideas?"
"Yes, although it will be more of a Plan B, in case things go south. While you're out in the airfield, plant some C4 charges on the fuel supplies there; I managed to smuggle some to a dead drop at the top of the cliffs not far from where you are now. We could create a set of explosions destroying the planes to stop them from following us… and halt Drakovich's A-Nile-8 shipping line."
"Speaking of which, do you know if there's anything he's shipping that's important to his plans in particular?"
"So far? Mostly new transhuman endoskeleton models for humans. Their features and bodily systems have to be tailored to fit the desired appearance and sensory intakes of those who bought them to have their minds uploaded to them. A-Nile-8 does that, and ships them to clinics all over the world for augmentation surgeries.
"They don't seem to matter to his plans much though. What matters is the Eye of Providence, and I'm glad you managed to find it back in Bangkok and turn it in to Geneva."
"What does it do exactly?"
"Put simply, it's a supercomputer that acts as a mass surveillance network connected to the Internet of Things and people's BISECTs, forming a global operating system, all connected to a satellite network. Initially I was hoping to use it for social engineering processes… to improve the human condition, and reduce the amount of resources that humanity is consuming just to remind themselves that they're human… and start a terraforming process to prevent global climate change from getting worse. If we want to prevent a mass extinction, we can't just improve our own biology, but the rest of the geosphere's as well by producing it."
"Sounds ambitious."
"But Dante hired another programmer to… corrupt the software within it somehow. While Dante and my motives lined up initially in terms of the ends we wanted to bring about—saving the world—our beliefs as to the best means of doing so differed. I… I think Dante wants to wipe humanity off the face of the Earth to preserve the rest of its life forms."
"I… I don't understand…" said Snake. "Until now, I thought Dante just wanted absolute control over humanity… And if he culls all of humanity, won't he have to erase himself too? Plus, there would be no species left to figure out a way to adequately terraform the Earth this fast!"
"You underestimate just how sick that awful excuse of a man truly is, Snake…" said Ultra Mouse, her voice shaking as she said this.
"Right, I see. This is worse than I ever could have imagined. Yet there's still so much of it that doesn't make sense to me. I feel like I'm being left out in terms of some of the facts!"
"All right… What else do you want to know?" said Ultra Mouse.
"Well, for starters…" said Snake as he looked out at the vast wall of snow and ice in the air. "…I had this dream. It had you in it."
"Really?" said Ultra Mouse, grinning again. "What were we doing together in the dream?"
"Actually, I wasn't doing anything," said Snake, "but I could hear what was going on. I was in a hospital, in a digital coma, about to be brought back to life via augmentation. But all of my friends were there, as well as you, even though I hadn't met you at the time."
"Oh…" said Mikki. "You must be remembering when you were augmented."
"What's strange is I don't remember much of what happened after that," said Snake. "Still, the memory keeps becoming more detailed the more I have it, and that's not all I remembered this time. They mentioned that they brought me back from Saudi Arabia, from Dante… Apparently, he had been keeping me permanently frozen and in a coma before I died, and you said that I was the only way to save the world… somehow."
"And I was right. You were needed to stop Dante. You're the only one who has a strong enough will to resist Dante's brainwashing."
"Then… why would he try to keep me alive still? That part doesn't make sense."
"I… I don't know."
Snake grunted. "All right. I suppose I'll have to figure it out for myself."
Ultra Mouse said, "I'm sorry, Snake… I admittedly don't have all the facts either. But I promise I'll try and help you find the rest of them. And help free the others' minds from Dante's control."
Snake sighed. "Good. I suppose we'd best get to work then."
Snake used the adhesive grip augmentations in his hands and feet to climb the ice walls. The glowing green lights he could see coming from the veins in his hands with his Solid Vision helped him know he had successfully attached to a solid wall of ice… while the lights turned red once he detached from the wall.
Despite a few close calls where he slipped a little on ice that wasn't thick enough to be clung to, Snake managed to make it to the top of the mountain.
Snake used his M14 EBR sniper rifle to snipe two guards on smoke break standing in the way of the compound. He used his Solid Vision to spot snipers in towers surrounding a gap in the razor—wired electric fences, then found a good vantage point on a snowy hill, and hit the deck. He used his suppressed M14 EBR to quietly take out the enemy snipers before they could spot him in his OctoCamo.
He then shot the guards hanging out near the gap.
Snake quickly crawled toward the gap as a convoy of planes flew above him toward the airfield within the A-Nile-8 compound.
Drakovich must be on one of those planes, Snake thought.
Snake called Otacon on his Cranial Codec. "Otacon, come in; can you pull up the schematics to the airfield so I can find a way to disable the electric fence."
No response.
"Otacon, come in, over!"
"Sn- Snake, this is Sunny."
"Sunny?" said Snake. "Why isn't Otacon responding?"
"He's n- napping," said Sunny. "Losing the others made him sn- nap. He's been taking sedative medications lately to help him sleep lately. He's traumatized."
"I understand," said Snake. "Can you send me the schematics?"
"Sure," said Sunny. "Give me just an- nother minute."
"Sunny," said Snake, "you're traumatized too, aren't you?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Your speech issues came back." That made Snake think of something for a moment, but he quickly forgot what he was thinking of.
"N- no," said Sunny. "I'm managing. My lisp has always been there."
"Really?" said Snake. "Because Raiden said you outgrew it not long after you became friends with Naomi, and that boy… during the SOP incident. You became a lot more… well, sunny."
"You're… you're right," said Sunny. "The thought of losing everyone is giving me n- nightmares… survivor's guilt… and n- nausea… like I have butterflies in my stomach."
"I'm sorry, Sunny," said Snake. "But you have to hang in there for me. I don't want to lose you too. And promise me you'll look after Otacon. I'm worried about him. I'm worried about both of you."
"I k- know. I will."
Snake heard Sunny typing on her computer over his Codec; she said, "Alright, Snake… unfortunately, the power boxes for the electric fence are on the far side of the A-N-Nile-8 compound… You're going to have to find a gap in the fence."
"I know," said Snake. "I see one, but it's a tight squeeze. Give me a minute."
"Okay."
Snake focused his posture, vision, and attention on the hole in the glowing blue fence, then quickly ran at it and did an acrobatic rolling move in mid-air to make it through the gap without being electrocuted.
Snake wiped his forehead.
He then noticed a crate full of explosives nearby the small tent closest to his current position.
Snake looked around for enemy patrols, then crept up to it and looked inside it.
It's Ultra Mouse's C4 she mentioned.
Snake quickly grabbed the C4 charges, then saw what looked like a hollowed-out compartment door at the bottom of the crate.
Breaking it open, Snake saw a software syringe inside it that he could insert into his neck and upload to his BISECT.
Snake scanned the syringe. "Sunny, what's in this thing?"
"It looks like it's the Soliton Radar app Ultra Mouse wanted me to send you!" said Sunny. "Quickly, upload it to your BISECT!"
"It definitely would come in handy," said Snake, as he injected the syringe into the tiny slot in his artificial skin and endoskeleton.
Suddenly Snake could see the all-too-familiar tiny square map filled with the location of enemy soldiers and their cones of vision.
Good, said Snake, when he saw a nearby enemy's blip on his radar emit a sound indicator.
Snake utilized his enhanced hearing as a directional mic to eavesdrop.
The guard was talking on his communicator inside the tent.
"What is it?" said the guard.
"Status report, soldier," said a familiar voice.
That's Meryl on the communicator, thought Snake.
"All is fine over here… other than the bitter cold."
"You're wrong about that," said Meryl. "The snipers outside the compound near your patrol sector haven't responded for the last several minutes… I want you to take a squad of men and go check out that area for potential intruders… He might be here. Sending the location to your GPS."
"Yes, ma'am," said the soldier.
The soldier was talking into his communicator to get together a squadron of soldiers. Snake quietly crept past the tent while crouch-walking, then used the next several tents in the massive airfield as cover while the squad the soldier called in passed him. He then snuck out into the airfield, and hit the deck. He then started to crawl through the airfield full of guards and aerial drones, and began to plant the C4 charges on all the parked A-Nile-8 shipment planes. He occasionally had to shoot some guards and stun some drones with his stun gun to avoid detection.
"N- new objective, Snake," said Sunny. "Ultra Mouse is meeting with the others at the A-N- Nile-8 main office building where the manufacturing centers and warehouses are. She's busy preserving her cover right now, so she can't talk to you. You're to go to the air control tower and wait for them to meet. Then you're to eavesdrop on their meeting with your enhanced hearing and the camera feeds in the control tower. It should be a good vantage point."
"All right," said Snake.
"Watch out, S- Snake," said Sunny, "the A-N-Nile-8 main complex is crawling with guards and civilians. You'll want to keep your distance."
"Of course, Sunny," said Snake, before he headed out.
Snake quickly went to the fuel depot, avoided the nearby security cameras' cones of vision nearby, and planted his remaining C4 on the fuel tanks.
This mission reminds me of one of those VR training missions Raiden mentioned a while ago, Snake thought. Something called "Modern Warfare, Module 02-0003." He nicknamed it "Cliffhanger." Even in VR, using C4 feels more like ancient warfare now, though, given how much times have changed. All the advanced PMCs are using more high-tech explosives than that, ones that they can launch from their arms' cannon augmentations.
Snake quickly headed toward the control tower.
After taking out the guards blocking the entrance with his suppressed M4 Custom, Snake crouch-walked toward the doors leading into the control tower and hacked their electronic locks. He then entered the tower, shooting guards protecting the stairways in their heads with his SOCOM pistol after hiding behind and checking his corners. He also used a chaff grenade to temporarily short-circuit the cameras guarding the hallways the further up he got.
Finally, he made it to the top of the control tower, and knocked out the guards at the top with some CQC attacks. Before the chaff's effects wore off, he hacked into the control tower's computers and disabled its security cameras.
The cameras won't spot those guards' corpses now, Snake thought.
He quickly accessed the cameras across the airfield and in the fulfillment center.
"I've got access to views of the entire compound, Sunny."
"Good job, Snake."
Snake looked at the feeds viewing the interior of the factories.
"Ultra Mouse was right… they're producing massive amounts of transhuman endoskeletons, and sending them on planes to be shipped to customers after they're tailored per order to make them look like what each customer wants themselves to look like on the outside… as well as augment them to the customers' liking."
"What do you think is so special about this fulfillment center that she's m- missing?"
"I don't know, but perhaps this eavesdropping conversation can help us figure that out," said Snake. "What now?"
"We wait," said Sunny.
Several hours later, more planes arrived on the airfield. Snake stopped smoking his e-cigarettes to pass the time.
"You're not watching your n-nicotine intake, are you, Sn- nake?" said Sunny.
"It's not like they'll harm me now that I'm a cyborg."
"But you can't even feel the effects!"
"I know. Smoking them just helps me remember what those effects were like." Flipping through the various security camera and drone feeds viewing the airfield, Snake said, "Wait a minute… It's Drakovich… he's meeting with Bozeman."
Snake said as he scanned the airfield, "And Meryl and the others… they're guarding him. I also see Ultra Mouse and Liquid getting off the plane together. That can't be good…"
Sunny said, "All right, Sn- snake. I think it's best we stop talking to each other and start eavesdropping on the meeting."
"All right," said Snake.
Snake zoomed the security camera feeds in on Drakovich and the others.
"Glad you could make it here, Dante," said Jeffrey. "The new endoskeletal models are now fitted with the BISECT upgrades fitted to your Reality of Things network connected to the net as requested."
"Excellent," said Dante. "You've helped Firelake advance its agenda ahead of schedule. You continue to impress me, Jeffrey."
"Thank you, Dante," said Jeffrey.
"Now if only you'd save us a more considerable amount of funding through A-Nile-8's immense profits."
Jeffrey looked at Dante nervously. "You're talking about how President Brady forced the new raised minimum wage laws onto the corporations in the US? I had no choice—"
"But you had a choice to stay at the minimum wage level, and instead you chose to raise it higher."
"W- we were short on laborer-customers…" said Jeffrey. "People were complaining about our working conditions, it seemed like the only viable move at the time—"
"Enough excuses, Bozeman!" said Dante as his veins began to crackle with lightning. Jeffrey began to tremble. "You can easily use your money I've so generously provided you to lobby Congress and break up the unions. Things must go according to plan, meaning you must follow my orders to the T. T as in transhuman. If you fail to meet my expectations…"
"I- I understand…" said Jeffrey.
"Good," said Dante. "You're dismissed."
Dante said to the others once Jeffrey was out of sight, "he's the mole, isn't he, Ocelot?"
"He might be, sir," said Ocelot, "though I suspect he's merely scared since you've pushed him into a corner of his cozy little tax haven."
"Nonsense, Ocelot!" said Dante. "Naomi, tell Ocelot what you found out."
"Of course, Dante," said Naomi. "While having some of your men pose as technicians to look through A-Nile-8's R.O.T. network, I found out that he plans to try and stop your ambitions for humanity from happening."
"I see," said Ocelot as he rubbed his chin. "He's not scared for his life… he's scared for his… humanity."
"His and his only," said Mei Ling. "He only cares about himself. He doesn't mind erasing his laborer-customers' consciousnesses to make them a more productive and docile workforce."
"I should burn him alive," said Rosemary.
"Or perhaps I should suck the life out of him. Very slowly," said Raiden as he licked his lips.
"Not yet," said Dante. "I need to find a proper replacement for him. I'll be meeting with Campbell and the other Apostles in Rome to discuss what to do regarding this… as well as next steps."
"Your larger test for the posthuman signal on the Net is nearly ready, isn't it?" said Meryl.
"Yes, it is," said Dante. "Hong Kong was merely the beginning. More of a distraction than a test since the technology wasn't quite ready to deliver the results I wanted back then. The old world order is too concerned about petty government quarrels and ideology rather than resource hoarding and saving the world from climate change. And now that World War Three is rearing its ugly head should our plans fail…"
"The politicians will have no choice but to accept your plans," said Meryl. "It makes sense."
"Where is this test going to be launched from?" said Ocelot. "I'd very much enjoy seeing where it all goes down at."
"I'll discuss this with you in Rome, Ocelot," said Dante. "In the meantime… keep an eye on Bozeman and his subsidiary for me."
"Yes, sir," said Fat Snake. "As for his mass production line… Mikki!"
Ultra Mouse's attention snapped to Liquid, as if she was startled.
"What's the status on his inventory?"
"The amount of flesh harvested from the bodies of former SOP mercenaries and the overworked and injured laborer-customers to cover your endoskeleton augmentations is enough to keep A-Nile-8's customers satisfied until the plans begin," said Mikki. "Also, the metal mines and refineries up in Russia are producing enough raw materials to develop enough endoskeletons."
"Same for the rare earth elements being harvested and produced in China," said Mei Ling. "Keeping them away from America by attacking Hong Kong and setting both world superpowers against each other helped improve China's business interests with Firelake… meaning you can develop more posthuman BISECT models. My fleet made sure of that."
"Good work, Mei Ling," said Dante with a grin. "Mikki, my love?"
"Yes, sir?" said Ultra Mouse.
"What's your progress on developing another Eye of Providence?"
"I'm almost there, sir," she said.
"Not good enough," said Dante. "I'm going to have Naomi work with you on programming it."
"That's not necessary, sir—"
"It is if I say it is, and I said it," said Dante with a frown.
Ultra Mouse nodded out of fear.
"Now that's enough chit-chat out here," said Dante.
"Agreed, sir," said Meryl. "We'll take you on a tour of the facility in the meantime to see how production is going."
"Thank you, Meryl," said Dante. "After you're done, keep an eye out… for him.
"Snake is on our tail… I know that much. But after the Eye of Providence was stolen in Bangkok, I suspect he may be practically right next to us, hiding in plain sight even…"
"But Snake was never good at that," she said. "He's good at hiding in tall grass, mud, and snow with camouflage, not in plain sight with disguises."
"You seem to know him awfully well, Meryl…" said Ocelot.
"If you're implying Meryl's the mole," said Dante, "she's not. She was the first member of Snake's team that I tested the consciousness-erasing technology on… As a matter of fact, I suspect she decided to become a posthuman of her own free will while she still had it left."
Snake's eyes went wide out of horror upon hearing this. Meryl, how could you do something like that to yourself…
"Strange," said Naomi, "it's not like you to want to be chained to fate like that, Meryl."
"No one wants to be initially," said Meryl with a frown. "It's just a matter of realizing gradually that there's no choice in our fate. Life has to end at some point."
"You all can exchange poetics when I'm feeling more patient," said Dante. "Anyway, I've read Snake's profile. Meryl's judgments of Snake's character are sound. Perhaps I was being a little paranoid. It's more likely that it was the mole that stole it."
"Right," said Meryl. "Let's go on the tour then. Perhaps we can look for the mole among Jeffrey's laborer-customers… and maybe we'll even find Snake hiding somewhere in the fulfillment center."
"They do have a lot of cardboard boxes in there…" Ocelot mused.
Dante chuckled at that, before he, Fat Snake, Ultra Mouse, and Cyber Snake's former friends headed through the airfield for the fulfillment center.
"Quickly S-snake," said Sunny over Snake's C3, "follow them into the fulfillment center!"
Snake used his jets that he used for the HALO jump in Hong Kong to descend from the top of the extremely tall control tower.
On his way down, he heard a rumbling sound, among with a familiar signature screech in the distance.
Only the sheer size, length, and volume of this screech nearly caused him to fall on his face upon landing due to how it shook him.
Looking around, Snake thought, is… is that the voice of Dante's new Metal Gear?
"Sunny? Come in!" Snake thought via his C3. "I think there's a Metal Gear that's already active… and it's the hugest Metal Gear I've ever… heard…"
Snake then looked up at the sky, and his jaw practically hit the floor.
If he still had a human body, it would be trembling out of fear.
This Metal Gear doesn't walk… it flies… and it's the size of Manhattan… much bigger than Arsenal Gear and Outer Haven combined… I don't stand a chance of taking that thing on by myself!
"Sunny, please, come in!" shouted Snake.
But he heard static on her line.
"Otacon, come in!" shouted Snake.
Same result.
"Ultra Mouse, anyone, please, come in!" Snake screamed in his head over his communicator.
But all he could hear over his communicator was white noise as the Metal Gear's roar grew louder.
Snake desperately ran for shelter within the fulfillment center as the ground shook. He managed to make it to a smoking area outside of it where there were also stations with a set of parked cable cars overlooking a massive drop down into the mountains; Snake assumed they were to help laborer-customers descend from their dystopian workplace up here. He took shelter within one of the empty cable cars. Needless to say, it was a miracle he hadn't been seen.
He waited there, praying that the Metal Gear wouldn't be able to detect him there.
Still, its bone-piercing roar grew louder and louder as it seemed to get closer to Snake.
Snake desperately wanted to cover his ears and shut his eyes.
Then, to his relief, the Metal Gear gradually grew quieter and further away.
Snake looked up out the cable car's window; the Metal Gear was ascending into space until he could barely see or hear it through the whiteout.
Catching his breath, Snake looked at the smoking area which likely reeked of smoke.
Snake shook his head, and said, no, I said I'd quit. I can't even smoke anymore and yet I was starting to make a pathetic attempt at a relapse earlier!
Sunny contacted him back all of a sudden. "S- s- s- s… s- sn- nn- nn…"
"Sunny?"
"Sn-nn- SNNNNAKE!" Sunny's hologram showed that she was trembling, and she began to break down and cry.
Snake looked at Sunny, and said, "Is Otacon awake?"
"Yeah…" said Otacon, "I was just woken up by that dreadful Metal Gear."
"Otacon, take care of Sunny. She's terrified."
"All right," said Otacon. "Sunny, it's all right... Snake will take that thing down."
Otacon gave Sunny a hug.
Sunny whimpered, and said quietly, "he doesn't st- stand a chance… none of us do! This is all my f- fault..."
Snake said to Sunny, "This isn't your fault, Sunny. This is Dante's. I need to contact the mole and figure out why the hell that thing is active and why I'm not dead already."
"Okay, Snake," said Otacon. "While I'd love to hear your chat with them, Sunny and I are going dark; I need to get the Nomad as far away from there as possible… Even the rendezvous point down at the bottom of the mountain range is a risk at this point; I could still feel the shock waves of that thing from here!"
Snake frowned, and nodded as he looked in the direction of the fulfillment center.
Snake used his Solid Vision to look at the fulfillment center again from the cable car. He saw some vents in the ceiling that had opened.
He contacted Ultra Mouse.
"Ultra Mouse, are you there?"
"Snake?" said Mikki, who was crying in a woman's bathroom stall; her mascara was running.
"Don't tell me; you saw Dante's Metal Gear too."
"I did… and I got to see first-hand the effects merely seeing it had on the laborer-customers here… The vents in the ceiling were opened so Dante could use his new Metal Gear, Metal Gear DAEMON, to terrify the laborer-customers suspected of attempting to form a union into submission."
"Working conditions there must be really terrible," said Snake.
"The wealth gap effects everyone, Snake, even those who think they benefit from it," she said. "The one percent are accelerating the apocalypse due to how much resources they're hoarding and how much pollution their various next-gen PMCs and megacorporations are causing… but after knowing Metal Gear DAEMON is active, the apocalypse is likely going to be here in a matter of a week at most."
"Then we have to hurry," said Snake. "Is there a weakness to that thing?"
"I don't know, Snake…" she cried. "I helped design it, but I was forced to make sure it was created without one!" She rubbed her fists against her hair until her blonde hair became a mess. "This perfect mechanical brain of mine was exactly what Dante needed to complete his plans!"
"If you designed it, then you can walk me through how it works, though."
"Right. Of course," she said. She wiped her eyes, and he heard her partially zip up her villainous catsuit Dante had her wear after hearing the flushing of a toilet.
Realizing he had been looking at her while she was naked, Snake blushed. Fortunately her breasts were off-screen. He said, "Were you hiding in the bathroom… or actually going to the bathroom?" said Snake.
"Both," Mikki said while sniffling. "Normally I supposed I'd joke about you having a dirty mind and that the toilets here are automatic, but—"
"…on second thought, I think that's enough intel for now, Mikki," said Snake.
"…okay," she said. "I'm supposed to meet back with Dante after the employees lunch break is over, and it's about to start. I need another drink…" Pulling herself together, she said as she went to splash some water on her face in the sink, "Anyway, don't worry about me. I'll provide a distraction of some kind. Get here and see if you can find Jeffrey. After that last exchange with Dante, he sounds like he's in trouble; I suspect he might be willing to give us dirt on Dante in exchange for protection."
"All right, Ultra Mouse," said Snake.
Snake heard male voices coming from outside her stall.
"…that was terrifying… thankfully I didn't pee my pants after that massive thing in the sky appeared…"
"…tell me about it. On top of that, I've been having to hold it in all shift long due to how little break time we have…"
"…I need a smoke…"
"Shit…" said Ultra Mouse, "…I must've gone to the men's restroom by accident… Hmmm…" she said while looking around, "speaking of lack of protection, maybe I can cause a distraction in here."
"Please tell me you're not going to do what I think you're going to do…" said Snake, "…with a bunch of male factory workers in that dirty bathroom…"
"I'll be all right, Snake," she said, "I can take on dozens of them if need be."
Snake cringed at this.
"Besides, unlike Dante, they actually have souls. And when in despair, people with souls need to find a way to cope somehow. I tend to cope with sex, alcohol… and cheese… and a lot of others tend to heal theirs with at least the former two things also. I owe it to them to help them feel better right now… along with the rest of humanity due to my sins. If this is how I do that for now… so be it."
"You really are like a cyborg succubus…" said Snake.
"I wasn't always like this, Snake," said Ultra Mouse, looking down out of self-pity. "Maybe if we manage to survive somehow, I'll tell you who I really am."
I'm not sure I want to know, thought Snake as she turned around to open the stall door and her Codec's screen went blank.
Getting back on track, Snake quickly climbed the walls of the fulfillment center with his adhesive grip, and then climbed through the gaps in the ceiling before they were closed again.
He crawled along the ceiling walls, utilizing his OctoCamo to blend in with them, occasionally hanging upside down to spy on his former friends.
Synchronizing his vision with his Soliton Radar augmentations, he managed to track them; they were on the opposite side of the factory.
Good, Snake thought, as he used his grappling line to rappel down the fulfillment center wall when no one was looking. However, there were guards overlooking the lower levels of the fulfillment center and the various assembly lines who occasionally looked up. Thankfully the Soliton Radar detected this. Snake had to predict their head movements using his Solid Vision in sync with the Soliton Radar and stay still, pressing himself against the wall to blend before a guard ever looked up toward his direction.
Eventually he made it all the way down, and hid in a nearby cardboard box.
Snake used the mouse-like drone Drebin gave him, the Metal Gear Mk. VII, to take out some civilian laborer-customers ahead of him. The optically camouflaged mouse-like drone quickly zapped several laborer-customers working on loading totes full of items they took out of boxes onto the conveyor belt with the taser built into its tail.
After thinning the herd that way, Snake moved forward, knocking out the remaining laborer-customers in the way of his path forward to Jeffrey Bozeman's office with some CQC and stun gun rounds while using the noise of the facility to his advantage, and using the assembly line's various working stations for cover when it was needed, all the while using his OctoCamo. Unfortunately, the path forward was blocked by Snake's former friends.
No, said Snake, there's no way I can take them all at once. I don't want to take them on anyway. I have to find a way to undo their programming first!
They're smart, and they know my techniques; I won't be able to distract them with an empty gun magazine or something. What do I do… what do I do…
Suddenly Dante and Fat Snake walked toward his friends.
"Bozeman awaits you in his office, sir," hissed Raiden.
"Bozeman can wait. Where'd Mikki go? Ocelot and I have been looking all over for her," said Dante. "She's supposed to be with Naomi, discussing next steps for the Eye of Providence," said Dante.
"Naomi's working with the center's computer programmers right now," said Meryl.
"I don't like this," said Mei Ling. "Why are you refusing to erase her human consciousness again, Dante?"
"Because her consciousness is like mine, one that's necessary to create humanity's future. She's a genius, like that of a machine herself… but not quite. Whereas I am the one who has the ambition to create the future, she is the one who has the knowledge bases to help me achieve that ambition. Before we're all more like you, Naomi, someone has to make humanity to be like you. We need her mind intact; robbing her of her humanity would also rob her of the necessary human input needed to complete DICE.
I know her well. She's no common whore. The seduction games she plays are merely a façade. In the meantime, I can keep her in line myself the old-fashioned way."
"Ocelot, go to Naomi and tell the technicians to check security."
"Yes, sir," said Fat Snake, as he juggled a set of two soda cans… and downed…
Wait, thought Snake, he only downed one?
Fat Snake then chucked the two cans into a nearby trash can.
"Sir?" said Raiden. "I… found Mikki."
"Where?" said Dante.
"You may… need to see for yourself. Actually, we all might need to…"
"What is that bitch up to now…" muttered Dante.
"You don't think she's cheating on you, do you sir?" said Rosemary.
Fat Snake briefly looked in Cyber Snake's direction, making Snake worry that he had been detected.
Fat Snake then looked away, and burped.
"Ocelot, your orders still stand. Everyone else, let's see what Mikki's up to now. I know her well enough to know that she may be hiding something from me… She's like a Babushka doll; she has layers upon layers of outer facades to hide the monster that's lying underneath… It's only a matter of time before there aren't any layers that remain, and I'll be the one who removes her last."
That distraction came at a cost, Snake thought. Drakovich is getting suspicious of Mikki and his subordinates… he must be worried that they'll betray him because of how awful his plans are… they must know that they won't benefit anyone in the long run! He can't brainwash everyone into becoming posthuman, though… can he?
Snake waited for the others to leave, then crept toward the entrance to Bozeman's office, only for the massive magnetically locked doors to not budge an inch.
Shit, thought Snake, it's locked with some kind of voice recognition lock!
He also noticed a warning hazard sign in Russian next to the door.
Cyber Snake then looked at a rat crawling out of the trash can, and was reminded of Fat Snake's sleight of hand move.
Snake went over the trash can and fished out the empty soda cans. While one was still slightly wet, the other was dry, and had an e-sticky note curled up inside it.
Snake unrolled the e-sticky note, and scanned it with his Solid Vision.
The note was a relatively short text file.
It read:
We have a common enemy, brother. I propose a temporary truce. Here's the password to open the lock. As for the proper voice, you'll have to find it within you. Speak it, brother, and then… doors will open.
"Who are the Rat Patrol 01?"
Extremely confused, Snake walked up to the door, and spoke the password.
"Who are the Rat Patrol 01?"
The lights on the lock turned from red to green, and the door's magnetic seal opened.
Snake walked in, and to his shock, he saw a field of microwave emitters ahead of him.
Horrified, Snake started having flashbacks of when he had to walk through a similar hallway full of microwaves on the way to disarm the GW Patriot AI server with Sunny's cluster worm program, FOXALIVE, back during the SOP incident when Liquid plotted to rewrite the Patriots' core artificial intelligence, JD.
In order to get to Bozeman's office, he had no choice but to walk through them!
My body's a machine, my body's a machine… I can take it, I can take it… thought Snake as he entered the hallway.
During his trek through the microwave-filled room, he started to hallucinate.
Through a sea of vile, disgusting slush created by an endless icy storm, Snake could see in the distance… somehow, a recreation in his mind of the battle at Outer Haven… only it was through the perspectives of his friends…
"Come on, old friend, please hurry…" said Campbell.
"Lieutenant! Get up, Lieutenant!" Mei Ling cried to a particular dying soldier as the men aboard her ship were slowly being slaughtered by the Metal Gears.
"ROSE!" yelled Raiden as his cyborg body was stabbed through by Liquid's elite PMC troops.
"Snake, please hurry…" said Rose, "for the sake of our family, please get to the server soon!"
"Naomi… I'm scared… give me strength…" Otacon cried while on his laptop as Outer Haven's armada of Metal Gear RAYs battered Mei Ling's ship.
"Meryl, you're really sure you want to get married? I mean, you're not still in love with… you know… ?" said Johnny as he and Meryl engaged in a shootout with more of Liquid's troops.
"No, I'm over him," said Meryl. "I just don't want him to die like this!"
"Otacon?" said Sunny as she came out of the Nomad's kitchen. "I cooked the eggs right again! Do you want to try them? This time I tried putting a new topping on them… Drebin gave some to me since there's nothing on the ship to eat other than MREs and eggs… Do you want to try them?"
… … … … …
Snake quickly opened the door to the other side of the microwave-filled corridor, and shut it tight. He then fell over onto the floor and screamed demonically, with the peripheral nerve wires connected to his BISECT pulsing bright white and blue through his terrifying endoskeleton, now completely void of skin.
Somehow though, the endoskeleton was not even slightly damaged itself by the microwaves.
"Who's there?" said Jeffrey Bozeman.
"My friends… I don't want to lose my friends…" said Snake deliriously.
"Someone turned the microwaves guarding my office off, but I didn't recognize the voice," said Bozeman. "Who are you?"
Realizing someone was talking to him, Snake tried to snap out of his hallucinations, and fight through the pain. He got onto his feet again.
"Ah," said Jeffrey. "Ocelot said he'd sent someone to come get me out of here. You must be Solidus Snake."
"…Solidus?" said Snake.
Jeffrey frowned as he looked at Snake. "Who are the Apostles?"
Snake was so confused right now, he wasn't sure what to do.
"Who are the Apostles?"
Snake grabbed his head with his terrifying hand, and shook it.
"Don't make me tell Alisa to activate the nearby turrets and kill you—"
"Oh, for Christ's sake, 01310011161!" yelled Snake.
Jeffrey's frown disappeared. "That was the password. I guess you are Solidus. The third son produced from the Les Infants Terribles project, a clone of Big Boss himself…"
"Yes… I'm… wait…" said Snake as his artificial human flesh started to grow back over his endoskeleton again as the nanite healing agents kicked in.
"You're not Solidus?" said Bozeman.
"No, I'm not," said Snake now that his skin had fully grown back.
"You don't look like that of the picture Ocelot gave me. Also, your endoskeleton is acting bizarre; the microwaves have been disabled according to my sensors, so you shouldn't have been harmed by them. I can't imagine what it would be like for a human being to have to go through a hallway full of microwave emitters… You'd have to be a madman to do such a hellish thing. That's why I had it installed as a security precaution."
"What the hell is going on…" Snake muttered.
"It doesn't matter," said Bozeman. "You have to get me out of here, and back to Geneva. I promise I will help assist you and your allies in any way possible once I am safe in return for clemency. I know I was part of Daniil's conspiracy, but I want out now. He's a complete madman!"
"Why'd you go along with him in the first place, then?"
Bozeman sighed. "His goals initially seemed like they wound benefit my company. Turn a considerable portion of the human population's consciousness into a posthuman superconsciousness so they would become benevolent laborer-customers, meant to work and terraform the Earth, producing resources rather than consuming them like ordinary humans do. After all, now that humanity is completely transhuman, it no longer needs to do the ordinary things humans need to do to survive like eat, drink, sleep, procreate, or produce waste…
"But humanity is selfish… despite that it doesn't need to do those things, it still wants to do them. It's simply a means of keeping what little false identity humanity has intact left. As long as humanity keeps consuming the Earth's natural resources, global climate change will accelerate and a mass extinction event will be inevitable… I was working on turning A-Nile-8 into a company that helped produce terraforming technology in collaboration with Firelake, so that way we'd be able to turn humanity's workforce into an army of posthumans intended to work on terraforming the Earth so that future generations of natural species… and a select few transhumans like myself… could live on."
"How many transhumans were you going to leave transhuman?" said Snake.
"No more than 500 million…"
"That's despicable!" said Snake. "You're planning to rob the majority of humanity of what makes them human… their souls… just to benefit yourself?"
"Initially, yes, I was," said Bozeman. "That silly girl, Mikki, was naïve enough to think the technology she created for Firelake and A-Nile-8 would make the Earth a utopia. She doesn't seem to comprehend the inherently selfish nature of humans to want to consume more than they can produce."
"But Dante's ambitions are different. Worse than that, even…"
"What is Dante trying to do? And where does the new Metal Gear fit into all of this?"
"Metal Gear DAEMON? Are you sure you want to know?"
"Yes!" shouted Snake. "I came here for intel!"
"All right," said Bozeman. "Alisa! Upload the Metal Gear DAEMON schematics to this man's BISECT."
Snake could feel a massive surge of data entering his BISECT.
"Wait… the files are too big; they'll fry my brain!" shouted Snake. "Otacon, are you there, over!"
"I'm here, Snake."
"Is there a way I can download these files to the Nomad without frying my brain?"
"There is," said Otacon. "I can turn your BISECT into a conduit to send the files to my Nomad that way... it may affect your perception of things for a bit, though, so hang on."
"Just do it," said Snake.
"All right. I'm hacking into this new Reality of Things that Drakovich is having Bozeman connect to the net… jeez, the more I look into it the more this seems like a central global operating system of some kind… like one giant supercomputer program hooked up to various proxies… only, in this case, the proxies are BISECTs."
"Can you try to explain to me in layman's terms, Otacon?"
"You've heard of the Internet of Things? Right?"
Snake shook his head.
"It's basically the Internet, only it's hooked up to all sorts of devices other than just computers. Phones, tablets, televisions, fridges, showers… practically everything in smart homes… all meant to be controlled remotely to make things easier."
"Sounds scary when you wonder who controls it are."
"It gets rather unethical now that it's the Reality of Things… a next-generation sort of metaverse where the lines between reality and the Internet are blurred together after the Internet is also connected to humans' BISECTs in ways that offer tech giants like A-Nile-8 and Firelake to have access to their BISECTs… This was already implemented somewhat, mostly for the sake of using big data to study humans' inner needs by monitoring their thoughts… Then they'd flood humans with advertisements for products and services that their algorithms thought could fulfill those needs."
"All this time since humanity started uploading their minds to cybernetic bodies, corporations have been literally reading our minds… ? Dear God, George Orwell should be rolling over in his grave by now," said Snake. "So that explains how every time I connect my BISECT to the Internet I get flooded with advertisements for rations, weapons, e-magazines, music… ?"
"Yeah, only monitoring, cataloguing, and analyzing human thought is harder to do then with mere simple algorithms… massive artificial intelligences were needed to do this." said Otacon. "That was how a lot of the initial fears around robotic takeovers started due to all the crashes in software affecting the minds of the initial people who chose to become cyborgs. The invasive software's glitches combined with their consciousnesses drove a lot of them crazy…
"These controversies led to the world's governments passing antitrust and restriction laws on tech giants and transhumanist medical companies so they would be more careful with said software. But the reality is these companies always keep finding new ways to bypass said laws thanks to how much the technology is evolving. We're living in an age where artificial intelligence is already more advanced than human intelligence, to the extent that we're unable to comprehend the technology as fast as it's evolving!"
"That's not good for the future of humanity…," said Snake. "And I assume that's how Dante managed that attack in Hong Kong… the one that drove everyone in the city insane enough to start killing each other."
"From these files, it looks like you're right, Snake," said Otacon. "The Limbo stronghold was used to test the Reality of Things network on a smaller, city-wide scale… It was also used to kidnap transhuman test subjects trafficked in with the help of Dante's PMCs and practice erasing their human consciousnesses from their BISECTs… turning them from transhuman to posthuman. According to these files, the experiments were gruesome. None of the failed test subjects survived, and the ones that did… Aside from their outwardly human appearances, they have no human qualities about them anymore whatsoever… They're essentially androids, Snake."
"And that's what Meryl and the others are?"
"I'm afraid that's the truth, and I don't know if there's a way to reverse the effects, bring their consciousnesses back!"
Snake grimaced. "Otacon, Bozeman said that the larger plan was to turn most of humanity posthuman… and that Drakovich's plans were worse than that."
"Oh my god… Snake, you don't think…"
"That psychopath…"
"He means to rid the entire human population of its collective consciousness, to the point that we're all just a bunch of soulless machines… Even his own consciousness?"
"We have to stop him. No matter what, Otacon."
"Agreed, Snake. I hate to think about it, but I think our friends may be a lost cause at this point. The stakes are much higher than I'd ever imagined. And with that said, it looks like the files are almost done downloading. Now you have to get out of there!"
"I know," said Snake.
Jeffrey Bozeman said, "Are the files done downloading?"
"Yes, almost," said Snake.
"Good," said Jeffrey, "now, you have to hurry and get me out of here… Once Dante realizes I'm gone—"
Then a massive field of electricity knocked Snake over, along with Jeffrey.
As Snake got up, he crawled for his M4, only for Meryl to kick it away.
"Nice try, Snake," she said as she stomped on Snake's head and aimed at him with her infinite machine gun arm augmentations.
Snake's former friends, Ultra Mouse, and Dante looked at him on the floor. Dante then looked toward Jeffrey, whose endoskeleton was still convulsing with electric bolts on the floor.
As Snake got up, Dante frowned and said, "It looks like our friend Mr. Bozeman was not the mole, but was willing to play informant after giving up on DICE."
"D- Dante, I- I'm s- sorry…"
"No need to apologize, Mr. Bozeman," laughed Dante. "Naomi detected a large amount of data coming from your office. When she saw what it was, she told me that it was the part of my plan already included in the much larger set of data that was stolen from my facility in Hong Kong. So, if you were truly cooperating with the mole to take me down, then they wouldn't have bothered wasting so much time downloading the same files they've already stolen again."
"Hong Kong? Dante's Infernal Conflict's Evolution?" said Jeffrey.
"Exactly," said Dante.
"So… if this was a waste of time, then that means I haven't done anything detrimental to your plans, right? I can still work with you… right?"
Dante's grin widened. "I won't turn you posthuman, Dante."
Breaking down into a hysterical cry, Jeffrey said, "Thank you, Dante!"
Dante then proceeded to zap Jeffrey's endoskeleton with electricity that had a high enough current to fry an ordinary human to an extremely painful death.
The CEO of A-Nile-8's endoskeleton wobbled around as it was barely functional now. Dante then picked up Jeffrey, and beat his endoskeleton with his fists until it was scrap metal, and then crushed his skull with his foot, short-circuiting his BISECT.
"Fool," said Dante. "Even being a posthuman would've been better than dying like that."
Snake said, "Dante, you're insane… you're trying to turn humanity into a posthuman slave race!"
Dante laughed. "Humanity is already posthuman, Snake. We're copies of a priceless original species that can never, ever be replaced."
"But erasing their consciousnesses…"
"Is the final evolution of a conflict I've waited to end for so long…" said Dante. "Humanity is self-destructing, Snake… and it's going to bring the rest of life on Earth with it if we don't do something about it, and now."
"Where does Metal Gear DAEMON fit into this?"
"Don't you already know?" laughed Dante. "Or are you just another puppet, willing to preserve the old, primitive world for what little time it has left?"
Cyber Snake looked around at Ultra Mouse and the others. For some reason, Fat Snake wasn't with them.
"He doesn't know anything," said Meryl. "He's just a soldier, trained to do as he's told."
"No, I'm not!" yelled Snake. "What happened to wanting to live your own life, Meryl! One where you can be free to do the things you've always wanted to do?"
Meryl grimaced at Snake.
"Was that just a lie? Were you posthuman then, too? Snap out of it, Meryl!"
"Are you talking about that spiel I gave you in Hong Kong about how I said I wanted to live among the stars? It's funny how we're willing to think of some imaginary places there that might be worth living at, worth going to, while our very home planet right here, the one place we're able to live on, is being torn to pieces."
"Well then, if you want to see the stars again, I'll let you see them one last time before we kill you."
Meryl fired armor-piercing bullets through Jeffrey's office ceiling until the ceiling was gone in an area above them.
Snake couldn't see the stars through the whiteout, but he could hear planes taking off.
Ultra Mouse said to Snake while in her villainous catsuit, "Because of your intrusion, Dante had to send the laborer-customers, clients, and all the partially finished outbound shipments away on short notice. See- for- yourself."
Snake heard another plane taking off and coming toward where they were.
"It'll all be over soon, Snake…" she continued. "Just go to your happy place… inside your head… and hold yourself down like a trigger there… forever."
"You admittedly need to work on your villainous monologue skills, Mikki…" said Dante, "and, later on, you and I are going to have to have a talk about this bad behavior of yours that went on in the men's bathroom today…"
Snake's eyes lit up for a moment.
She just tried to tell me something… See… for… yourself… See… for… see… four… wait, that's it! When she said go to the happy place inside my head and hold it down like a trigger, she meant…
"All right, Snake. No CQC tricks this time," said Meryl. "Put your hands above your head! Spread them apart!"
Snake complied, all while a plane flying above them grew ever closer.
"Now lie down on the ground!"
Calculating the trajectory with the Soliton Radar… just a little closer…
"I said lie down on the ground!"
"All right, Meryl," said Snake as he detonated the C4 he planted across the airfield, creating a massive chain of explosions that shook the ground enough to cause the others to become distracted.
Then a plane that exploded above them collided into the fulfillment center, sending them all flying into the walls of Bozeman's office behind Snake.
Save for Snake, who used his adhesive grips to cling to the floor while lying down.
Part of the plane's wing shredded through the microwave-emitter filled hallway, disabling it and its magnetic doors and causing the hallway to smash through the lower floors. Snake quickly got up and jumped through the hole in the floor while the others were still stunned.
Burning his way through the rubble with his electricity and smashing through it with his fists, Dante stood up and yelled, "SNAKE!"
Dante yelled to the others, "Get up, get after him now!" as Snake ran for his life.
Snake ran through the exploding fulfillment center, navigating through the maze of assembly lines, machines, and various stacks of packages and crates as it all collapsed around him.
Snake realized that he had to climb his way back through a hole in the ceiling to get out. He quickly fired his grapple line up and started climbing up the wall.
As Meryl appeared, he managed to climb all the way up before Meryl could hit him.
"Damn it!" yelled Meryl.
Outside, incoming choppers were coming in and dropping off some of Firelake's PMC transhuman soldiers who fired up at Snake as he reached the collapsing rooftops of the fulfillment center.
Snake quickly ran across them as bullets and rockets whizzed by him.
"Otacon, are you getting the Nomad's engines going?"
"Yeah, but I can't land on the airfield, it's too risky!" shouted Otacon.
"I figured as much," said Snake.
"Meet us in the town where all of Bozeman's employees live not too far from here, at the bottom of the mountain. Marking it on your map. Hurry, Snake; the storm's picking up and it's bad! We're running low on fuel too!"
Snake kept running across the rooftops; now there were PMC troops using jetpack augmentations to run up the walls of the fulfillment center.
Snake fired at them with his M4 Custom as they reached his level, switching to his SOCOM when need be. He managed to take several of them out.
One of the choppers tried to knock him off of the rooftops. Snake managed to hit the deck and avoid it just in time.
Aboard the back of the chopper was Naomi, who was firing at him with the dual sniper rifles built into her arms.
Snake screamed as two of her bullets knocked the M4 out of his hands and off the roof.
Shit, said Snake, she's a good shot!
Behind him, Raiden was climbing the walls extremely fast, and Rosemary was flying toward him, burning the biofuel in her jetpack to get toward him with impressive speed.
Snake quickly jumped off of the rooftops and descended safely toward where the cable cars were with his own jets. He then got in one of the cable cars, where there was a rocket launcher. Snake shot down some of the incoming helicopters full of Firelake's transhuman mercs that were coming toward him. He also grabbed a nearby futuristic .50-caliber machine gun and mounted it on the back window of the cable car, destroying some of the enemy cable cars approaching him.
Then for some reason his cable car ground to a halt.
Snake looked over with his Solid Vision.
In the distance, through the rapidly thickening smoke of the burning fulfillment center, Snake could see Mei Ling using her explosive nanite fireflies to cause an avalanche in the distance as she and the rest of Snake's former friends escaped the top of the mountain on a helicopter.
He quickly jumped on top of the cable car, and used his sword-drill to drill through the cable car's lines so he could use it as a zipline to save time.
As the avalanche rapidly approached Snake from behind, the zipline was severed, and Snake held onto the line for dear life as it swung him downward and slammed him into the side of a massive ice wall.
Smashing through it, upon landing, Snake found himself in an old mining facility where the alloys used to create the durable metal for manufacturing Firelake's cyborg endoskeletons were extracted.
Snake saw a mine cart on rails which led down to the bottom of the mountain.
"Otacon, can you help me hack this?"
"Oh, this looks easy, hang on…"
He quickly held his hand up to the mine cart's controls, and transmitted Otacon's hacking malware into them remotely with Otacon's help.
Snake hopped in as the cart started going down the rails.
Mid way down, he heard Fat Snake say, "Found you brother," as he fired various explosive proximity revolver bullets at the cart line, causing Snake's line to go off the rails. Snake hung on for dear life as the cart tumbled to the bottom of the mines and crashed.
Snake's body was covered in the blood of his artificial flesh as he got up and saw that he was trapped in a maze of old mining tunnels.
To Snake's horror, he could hear Fat Snake's revolving bullets ricocheting off of the walls.
Snake had to blend in.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are! You can't stop me brother! After all, you are me, and I am you!" Fat Snake laughed as he juggled his revolvers in front of Snake.
"So much for that temporary truce!" Snake yelled, and fired his SOCOM at Fat Snake, only for the bullets to merely graze him due to his magnetic shield device that was strapped to his hip.
Snake threw a stick of dynamite at Fat Snake, only for it to sizzle out.
"A dud!"
Fat Snake then ran at Snake, and the magnetic shield shoved Snake into the tunnel wall behind him, nearly crushing him against it.
"Enough, brother!" said Fat Snake as Cyber Snake aimed his SOCOM pistol at Fat Snake, who aimed his two revolvers at him.
"Do you honestly think you'll win this way?" said Fat Snake. "I'm not here to fight you."
"Then why the hell did you knock me off of that cart!"
"Cart?" said Fat Snake. "I thought I was destroying Dante's means of producing more posthumans, just like you did by smashing a plane into that fulfillment center!"
Snake grunted.
"I'm here to warn you, brother… Make no mistake, I am a mole working for President Brady… but I'm not the mole… While I will by no means endanger the real mole so long as she is useful to the same operation I've been assigned to, I also know that she is the true threat. I'm talking about your mouse friend, Snake. She may be helping President Brady stop Dante, but she also is responsible for developing the tools Dante needed to create his horrible new future.
Don't be fooled by her looks and her flirting. She is merely cleaning up her mess… and when everything is clean again and back to normal… she's going to stab us both in the back with just one knife!"
"Who is she then?"
"How should I know? If anything, you should know her better than I do!" said Fat Snake. "Perhaps you need to give her a call and ask. You can do so on your way to extraction. Oh, and one more thing…"
"What?"
"Keep in mind, Snake, that Dante has moles of his own. I know he at least has one. I was attempting to draw one of them out, by sending you to Jeffrey's office in lieu of them. I also believe Ultra Mouse sent you to get the DICE files before they could steal them and give them to Dante, all without incriminating him as the one responsible for the attack on Hong Kong to the public for the time being. Long enough for Dante to execute his plan. I think I know who it is now."
"Who is it?"
"Didn't you hear Jeffrey say his name? I believe you said it too."
Snake went wide-eyed. "Solidus?"
"Yes…" Then Fat Snake's eyes went wide. "Strange… Wait a minute… No, no, it can't be!"
Fat Snake said, with his tone making it sound almost as if he was in disbelief of what he was saying rather than belief, "The real mole working for Dante… is our father."
"Big Boss?" shouted Snake. "He died in my arms… in that graveyard, during our last smoke together, right after he killed Zero. If it weren't for him, I may have pulled the trigger… How the hell is he alive?"
"It sounds like that bothers you…" said Fat Snake, rubbing his chin.
"Is he even alive?"
"I don't know."
"How are you alive? How the hell are you alive!"
"Snake!" yelled Fat Snake as he pushed Cyber Snake against the wall.
"Perhaps I've revealed too much…" Fat Snake said. "All I know is that you're assigned to the same operation I am as well, and I can't endanger your life or your sanity… although the more I realize it, the more they seem to be one and the same. I fear if I tell you the truth… it may destroy you, and unravel everything."
"You're not making any sense!" yelled Cyber Snake.
"Perhaps I'm not, but I will in time," said Fat Snake as he juggled then holstered his revolvers, and then took out and juggled two sodas instead before downing one of them. "In the meantime, here's another sticky note. I managed to stick it on the bottom of this soda can. It contains a one-way Cybernetic Cranial Codec frequency. I will contact you when I pull together more information." said Fat Snake.
Handing Cyber Snake the soda, Fat Snake said, "Keep it."
"I won't be able to taste anything."
"Doesn't mean that nothing's there."
Snake sighed, and sipped the soda.
When he looked back up, Fat Snake was gone.
"Liquid?" said Cyber Snake.
"LIQUID!" he yelled again through the mine.
Snake sighed, and looked at the soda can before peeling the sticky note with the Codec frequency off the bottom of it.
Snake downed the rest of the soda before calling Otacon as he climbed out of the mining shaft.
"Snake, thank god! I've been trying to reach you for a while; you went dark, though! Where have you been."
"Catching up with an old friend…" said Snake. "Otacon, once I'm aboard the plane, I've got some calls I need to make."
Aboard the Nomad, Snake was using the Reality of Things black market network access Drebin gave him to buy more augmentations and weapons.
Sunny was helping him repair his endoskeleton. While Otacon was trying to get on the line with President Brady in another room, Snake was trying to call Ultra Mouse.
"Mikki?" said Snake.
"Hey… Snake…," said Ultra Mouse. She had a black eye, a bruised lip, and several bruises and lacerations on her body; she was trembling, as if trying to hold in tears. Her hair was hanging up toward the top of the camera, which indicated she was hanging upside down.
"What happened to you? Are… are you in a cage?"
"I'm fine…" she said. "My scars just take longer to heal than yours do…"
"It's Drakovich. Did he find out you were a mole?"
"No…" she said, "He's just… upset with me… Besides, if he found out I was the mole, I'd be dead… worse than dead."
"That piece of shit…," said Snake. "Will you be all right?"
"Yes," she said, "but I'm more worried about… about the rest of humanity right now!"
Snake thought about what Fat Snake told him earlier back in Russia.
"Ultra Mouse, why did you cooperate initially with Dante?"
"I thought I already told you that part."
"You did, but you left out the part about wiping out humanity's consciousness!"
"What?"
"Don't lie to me anymore, Mikki! What's going on? Something about this operation isn't making any sense, and you clearly know something that'll make it make sense!"
"No, Snake, I never wanted to erase humanity's consciousness, I wanted to preserve it! That's where Dante and I differed in terms of our motivations! We both wanted to save the Earth from a mass extinction event by terraforming it, but I wanted to save the Earth with humanity still in it. Whereas Dante thinks it's impossible to save both. He thinks the only way to save humanity and the world it exists in… is to erase everything that makes us human.
That's why I was so glad you got the Eye of Providence back. That little thing? It does one-way downloads of backup copies of the consciousnesses of every human being on Earth without being able to be accessed by external devices due to its sheer computing power. So long as Dante doesn't get his hands on this… and he doesn't make another, more powerful one… humanity can always upload their minds to new bodies."
Snake sighed. "Meryl and the others… are their consciousnesses stored on here as well?"
"Yes," said Mikki, "but as long as part of their consciousness is corrupted by a malware program… they won't come out as a complete consciousness when the re-upload happens."
"Can parts of their consciousnesses be un-corrupted?"
"I don't know, Snake," said Mikki. "I've… never seen an instance of that happening before… When a file is corrupted, it has to be erased to prevent it from corrupting other files… That's what this posthuman brainwashing is, Snake, it's just another computer virus. If we don't contain it, it'll spread."
Snake grunted. "Damn it." Then he said, "What about the DICE files?"
"What about them?"
"Ocelot told me that you sent me in place of another mole that he was trying to discover the identity of to get the files in Hong Kong. On top of that, they seem to be larger than I initially thought they were, almost like I never had them. Come to think of it, that alone makes no sense."
"Maybe the files were compressed somehow…," said Ultra Mouse.
"Wait a minute… Virtuous Limbo… The entire operation in Hong Kong… it was run by you?"
"…yes," said Ultra Mouse, looking down at the floor shamefully.
"Then Meryl and the others… you knew they were posthuman already, and you sent me in there to say hi to them anyway, telling me nothing!"
"I know…" said Ultra Mouse, shutting her eyes, "and I'm sorry. It had to seem like we had no clue they had been turned."
"…and yet I wouldn't have been enough to get the files alone. I needed Ocelot's help… of all the people in the world who could possibly want to help me. Now I know how you managed to keep Dante from destroying evidence of his conspiracy along with the rest of Hong Kong… the copy of the DICE files was never on my BISECT… Ocelot must've switched the files out with a dummy file and taken them to President Brady himself."
"…yes… that's… that's what happened, Snake…"
"You turned us all into pariahs again because of that," said Snake, "and you put me, Otacon, and Sunny—a child—in danger. You've earned our contempt for that. And now I know Ocelot was right to tell me not to trust you."
Ultra Mouse's eyes went wide open in shock.
"Did you say… Sunny? A… child?"
"Snake?" said Sunny as she returned with another augmentation, "This is an upgrade to your mechanical heart that will allow him to revive yourself if you're critically injured every now and then… or it can cause a power surge to turn your endoskeleton off… like a fake cyanide pill, it'll let you pretend you're dead."
"What?" said Snake. "What about Sunny?"
"What?" said Sunny. "Is someone talking about me?"
"Do you know her?" said Snake as he linked his Codec to his vision so he could show her Sunny.
Ultra Mouse's jaw hung open. The look in her eyes was heartbreaking.
"I… I need to stop talking now," said Ultra Mouse. "I'll see you on your next mission, Snake."
"But- but Mikki—"
"Goodbye, Snake!" Ultra Mouse yelled and shut off her Codec before she burst into tears.
In place of her in Snake's vision, Sunny stood now, appearing confused.
"Who was that on your C3, Snake?"
"The mole."
"What's her name?"
"Ultra Mouse."
"No, I mean her real name."
"…right, sorry. She said it was Mikki, even though that might not be her real-"
"I know who she is, Snake," said Sunny. "You sounded angry with her earlier."
"Who is she?"
"It doesn't matter," said Sunny. "You have to trust her, Snake. And protect her. For me."
"How do you know her, Sunny?" said Snake.
Sunny said, "It's not easy to talk about…"
Thinking about this for a second, Snake said, "Maybe I should ask Otacon if he can find out who she is."
As Snake went toward the door, Sunny yelled, "Wait, Snake, no! Don't tell Otacon!"
"What? Why not?"
"You can't trust Otacon. Not when it comes to this."
Now Snake was really confused. "But why can't I trust Otacon. He's my closest—"
"Snake?"
Sunny and Snake looked in the direction of the door to the other room.
"I managed to reach President Brady," said Otacon. "She wants to talk to you."
"About what?" said Snake.
"Rome," said Otacon, "which is where we're heading now."
"Right," said Snake, "that's where Dante said he's meeting the Apostles at. Firelake's main headquarters. The belly of the beast. What is she having us do?"
"According to her?" said Otacon. "Kill the Apostles. You're going to infiltrate their meeting, and slaughter them all in one fell swoop once you've heard enough."
"But I'll need to take someone's place and disguise myself as them to do that," said Snake. "Who am I going as?"
"You're not going to like this…" said Otacon.
"Just tell me, Otacon," said Snake.
"Colonel Campbell," said Otacon. "He's attending the meeting. Your orders are to kill him first."
