ACT 4: TWIN SUNS
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LET ME TELL you a story about a Snake.
He was one of the twin Snakes, a fragment of the whole. Some called him a shadow.
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Like his brother, he grew up knowing nothing of his birth parents. Like his brother, he had a name few were allowed to know. I don’t know what people called him before he was given his code designation. Having never called his twin brother by his birth name, he might have died not even knowing his own.
So I can only call him by his code name:
Liquid Snake.
Liquid was raised in the UK to be Solid Snake’s shadow. And like Snake, the young Liquid was not aware of, or allowed to learn of, the genetic fate he carried within his DNA. Like Snake, he went into the military at a young age. Then he joined the SIS, a British foreign intelligence service also known as MI6, where he proved as capable a spy as he was a soldier.
Back then, the price of oil was consistent and cheap, and the precious liquid was abundant all over the globe. But the market became flooded, and Iraq saw revenues from the sale of oil—the nation’s only commodity—shrink, crippling their efforts to rebuild an economy ravaged by the Iran-Iraq War.
With Iraq and Kuwait’s history of conflict over oil fields, tensions heightened between the two states. War was clearly only a matter of time, and the nations of the world sent their intelligence agencies into action.
The only country in the G7 with an existing intelligence network in the region was Great Britain, who had maintained theirs since the colonial period. Although America later came to see Iraq as an enemy—despite having supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war—the US government had not yet been able to create an effective network in the region.
Therefore, the SIS sent Liquid to infiltrate Baghdad, and there he remained as a sleeper agent. By nature of his birth in the Les Enfants Terribles project, Liquid was part Japanese and could pass as half Turkish and half Caucasian. More importantly, his language abilities were a match for his brother’s, and he achieved a near-fluency in Arabic.
Liquid was gifted. Once inside Iraq, he quickly built connections with resistance fighters among the oppressed Kurds and Islamic fundamentalists repressed as part of Saddam’s pan-Arabist agenda.
With the aid of his contacts, Liquid was able to remain inside Baghdad even after the beginning of the Gulf War, amid the heavy presence of Mukhabarat (the Iraqi Intelligence Service) agents and counterspies within the secret police forces known as the al-Amn al-‘Amm.
Liquid was productive. He uncovered the locations of Scud missile mobile launching platforms, details of mustard gas production, and the movement of Republican Guard tanks. He sent reports to coalition forces, who used his information to plan a number of missions. For a short time during the war, both Snake and he were in Iraq and not far apart—one an American Green Beret, and the other a spy for the British SIS.
Liquid never understood how he, so adept an agent, got captured. Inside the van, headed for the secret police’s headquarters, with a canvas sack over his head, he appraised his situation from every angle.
“Where?” he whispered to himself. “Where did I go wrong? Surely I haven’t made a mistake. Did someone rat me out? Did they work backward from the list of bombed installations and find a common leak?”
What it just came down to was this: before the end of the Gulf War, Liquid’s luck ran out.
Liquid was trained to resist interrogation. But reality wasn’t as easy as training. The tortures of the al-Amn al-‘Amm interrogation squads were beyond imagination.
There, Liquid learned how far humanity was capable of going.
A man could become boundlessly cruel. Even a revered figure, once named an enemy, would be seen as less than human. The soldiers who gleefully rubbed salt into Liquid’s wounds were Muslims, but everything they did, they did for Saddam. There’s not much difference between gods and men.
Given absolute freedom, humans will sink to any depth.
Liquid witnessed what pitiful creatures chains made of men. Prisoner camps were designed to brainwash captives into believing themselves powerless and insignificant. Liquid abhorred all that would constrain life to no purpose but to live.
After the war, he vanished. Not once did he make contact with London. Nor did SIS ever attempt to find him. Maybe the situation was just too uncomfortable for the agency—for you see, they had used him as bait, and allowed his capture in order to secure a new informant valuable to Britain. Liquid was, essentially, a human sacrifice to get intelligence from a man close to Saddam.
Four years later, Liquid was rescued by the US military. I don’t know to where he drifted in the intervening years—from what I gather, he wandered the world, building his own international network. He never returned to Britain. Instead, he was scouted by the American forces and selected for the High-Tech Special Forces Unit FOXHOUND. By that time, Colonel Campbell had already left the unit, and when Liquid joined, he effectively became their new commander.
Under his new leadership, FOXHOUND—once a sizable, albeit hand-selected, group—was reformed as a selective ultra-elite force of a limited number of soldiers with superhuman abilities. Their ranks included Sniper Wolf, Psycho Mantis, and Decoy Octopus—presumably he met them in those four years he spent building his global network.
I don’t know if Liquid found Revolver Ocelot himself or if someone else introduced them. Either way, Ocelot was seen at Liquid’s side from the very beginning. Whether Liquid went to Ocelot or Ocelot approached FOXHOUND, the result was the same.
Liquid learned of his own secret origin.
Why he had been born. That his father was the legendary mercenary. That the man known to all in the underworld, Solid Snake, was his brother.
When he learned these truths, Liquid again felt the enmity he’d discovered inside the Baghdad prison camp. Anger toward his creators blossomed into a fiery rage.
He revered no gods and no heroes, and had come to feel contempt toward those who did believe in something.
But now he came face-to-face with the knowledge that he had been born nothing more than a mere reproduction of the genetic code of a person he neither revered nor respected.
Suddenly he found himself a prisoner of a fate he’d never wished for.
Idols and gods might be forgotten, but his genes were inescapable. His mind, his personality, his intellect, and his skills were all nothing more than traits inherited from his father.
The prison camp was nothing compared to this realization:
I’m imprisoned in my own body—and my genes make it a life sentence.
Surely a certain element of jealousy was involved. He must have surely thought it idiotic that his identical brother, his figurative cellmate trapped with the same DNA, came to be known as the legendary hero and as the man who made the impossible possible.
The accolades bestowed upon his brother were absolute proof of his imprisonment.
Liquid started to fight against his fate—to find freedom from despair and to put his very life on the line; to shout at the world, “I am me! I am myself and no one else! I am here!”
And he would do it by fulfilling his father’s dreams.
He saw it not as inheriting his father’s fate.
He would do what his father couldn’t. And what his brother couldn’t.
If he were successful, he would find liberation from his curse.