She may have been sitting in a cold, slightly-grimy apartment room, rented by Otacon at about two hours' notice, in front of a laptop, but her mind and heart and eyes were elsewhere. And that was how it was supposed to be.
That was her task, after all; to watch the proceedings through Snake's eyes, and to spot things that he didn't. That didn't happen often. Mei Ling had never met anyone more perceptive than that soldier, more alert or awake. She was also supposed to provide backup files, artificial memories when Snake's real one failed, and she hadn't needed to do that yet, since even Snake's memory was flawless. Once she'd pointed the end of a biro at him and calmly recited a list of thirty-five randomly generated numbers and letters at him, and he'd just watched and listened, clueless, without any sort of context. A week later, she'd grabbed him and ordered him to repeat the list, and he'd done it all perfectly.
Of course, he didn't have Mei Ling's memory skill. When he read a book, it didn't stay in his mind – it drifted out, and it changed, and a week later he wouldn't be able to recall a single line, only broad concepts. But she was different. When she read a book, it stayed and locked itself away in her head, line by line, quote-unquote. She couldn't watch an anime with Otacon more than once, or she'd go crazy knowing exactly which line came next. Of course, next to Snake's impressive hundred-and-twenty-five digits of pi committed to memory, her own sixteen digits seemed paltry. But he didn't absorb things the same way she did.
So that was her job; save the footage of what he'd experienced, watch for things he missed and remember things that he couldn't. He was the character, and she was watching his movie, through nanoes planted in the visual centre of her brain from nanoes planted in his retinas.
She usually squeezed her eyes shut when he killed anyone, but that didn't help because it wasn't going through her eyes, it was going straight into her mind. She felt almost like a psychic. Psycho Mantis had been skilled at something called Remote Viewing – he could watch events through other peoples' eyes. And he could force other people to do the same. She remembered the disguised fear in his voice as Snake had called them all in the Commander's Room – Naomi, are the nanomachines functioning alright? I'm having some sort of out-of-body experience. It's almost like I'm seeing out of Meryl's eyes… She hadn't developed the technology for the MANTIS Remote Viewer at the time. She supposed it must have been good practice.
Through Snake's eyes, she gazed out at his world. The colours in Snake's eyes were slightly distorted – some of it was feedback in the device itself, but some of it was simply because Snake was slightly colour-blind – had trouble telling the difference between dull reds and grey-greens. The hull of this ship, Arsenal, could have been either.
And they were all there. The King, standing like a proud monolith; The Queen, gazing out into the blank wasteland; The Jack, draped half-dead across the floor, blond hair matted, face crazy; and The Joker, idly wheeling the revolver from hand-to-hand, watching the proceedings. And she gazed at it all through the eyes of The Ace.
The MANTIS had no sound input. The Codec supplied that.
She listened, carefully, trying to follow all the tricks, the traps, the double-crosses. Everyone was tricking everyone else. No-one was the puppetmaster here. They all were. They were all holding someone else's string, and Raiden (who had provided her with some amusement during the mission, because he was ridiculously cute) was clearly the only one who wasn't. He was the lowest puppet in the pile. Not so much a shadow play as a Punch and Judy show. She'd seen one of those, once, when she'd visited England, and all of the kids knew what was going to happen next. She wished she did. This was a different sort of puppet show.
But the frightening thing was how she could only watch, listen through Snake. She knew what would happen if Snake died – the MANTIS would bluescreen and she'd be jerked out of the viewing, and she hated knowing that, knew fullwell how loudly she'd scream his name down the Codec if that happened.
It needed a quote – all these lies and faking, how everyone was playing their part, and she thought and found one. She put on a voice, like a Shakespearian actor, a bit like Liquid's. Quotes calmed her down – the systematic search through her memory helped her stay in perspective, helped her breathe.
"All the world's a stage," she began, voice trembling, trying to calm herself down, "and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts..."