3
✦ ✦ ✦
IN THE BEGINNING, there was Zero.
Big Mama started talking from there—with the man named Zero who was at the start of it all.
✦ ✦ ✦
She had once been known as EVA.
It was only one of a number of aliases, but she spent most of her life under that one.
EVA was a spy with many names, raised in the ways of espionage by the Philosophers, the group of twelve powerful figures from America, China, and Russia, in one of their operative training schools.
She met Big Boss during Operation Snake Eater, as a Soviet agent sent by the KGB to assist him on his mission.
But that was only a cover—she was an operative of the Chinese faction of the Philosophers’ post–World War II split. Her true goal: to acquire the microfilm, stolen by Volgin’s father, containing the only means to access the Philosopher’s Legacy.
But in the end, she failed her mission.
The Boss faked her defection to get close to Volgin, and put her life on the line for that tiny bit of plastic. She handed over the microfilm to Big Boss, and EVA stole it from him.
But the film was a forgery. Afraid of reprisals from the Chinese government, the triple agent fled to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War.
So who ended up with the Philosopher’s Legacy?
The man who had founded and led the CIA’s experimental special forces unit FOX—the man who was given charge of Operation Snake Eater.
He was a former member of the British SAS alongside The Boss. He was known as Zero. When he first met Big Boss, his rank was major. Like EVA, he had many names—among them Major Tom, David Oh—but most called him Zero.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then it was born.
With the enormous fortune of the Philosophers in hand, Zero brought into being a new organization to follow in the legacy of the legendary hero, The Boss. The other founding members were Mr. Sigint, Para-Medic, Big Boss—with Zero, the four core members of the FOX unit—and a young man who had infiltrated the GRU to get to Colonel Volgin and covertly help Zero. Ocelot.
They called themselves the Patriots.
EVA joined them when Ocelot helped her out of a dangerous situation in Hanoi. They revealed to her their purpose: to unite a world divided between East and West, Soviet and America, communism and capitalism. A unity of thought and awareness, so that all might share the same one view of the world.
The Patriots believed their vision to be the world The Boss had hoped for—a utopia where no soldier would be cast about by the changing times or have his life senselessly stolen. United, the Patriots shared in The Boss’s dreams.
That had been the world she envisioned behind those sincere, yet sad eyes.
With The Boss’s noble martyrdom, Zero felt a need for a new icon to propel the new organization.
He made Big Boss that icon. Zero gave rise to new legends, some wildly distorted and more fiction than reality, and added them to Big Boss’s famed achievements. The great mercenary. The strongest warrior in the post-war world.
But Big Boss wasn’t so callous a man that he’d accept those false honors without feeling he’d done The Boss wrong. It didn’t take long for the tiny fissure between Big Boss and Zero to grow irrevocably icy and deep.
He left Zero when the man became consumed by a thirst for control. He didn’t desire power or money themselves, but simply pursued his desire to join all the people of the world to one single dream—and he did so relentlessly and to grotesque ends, reaching extremes of paranoia with ideas of universal monitoring and control, and power through environmental simulations.
Big Boss couldn’t watch Zero distort The Boss’s ideals into a simple one-sided dogma.
When Zero noticed Big Boss growing ever more distant, he started a new project in secret. Dr. Clark, known at the time as Para-Medic, headed the efforts.
What Zero really wanted was another Big Boss, but the warrior had been exposed to radiation in his youth and could not father children. If Zero wanted another fighter with Big Boss’s genetic traits, he needed to create one outside the normal methods of reproduction.
The project’s name was Les Enfants Terribles, and its goal was to clone Big Boss, the ultimate soldier. After dozens of failures, they finally, miraculously, succeeded in producing a fertilized egg—an imitation life born from somatic cells. EVA volunteered to serve as the surrogate mother, to protect the egg inside her body until birth.
Her joy was to give birth to Big Boss.
But the project would split Zero and Big Boss once and for all. When Big Boss learned of the births of his two copies, Solid and Liquid, he left America and, after years of drifting, founded the private military company Outer Heaven in South Africa.
In this way, Big Boss declared war against Zero—and any who would twist The Boss’s “joy” into an appalling dogma.