HELICOPTER BLADES BEAT against the sky, and their sound slapped his eardrums.
The ocean’s scent.
Snake tried to lift his eyelids, but they were as stiff as fired clay. Finally, he managed to force his eyes open—only to see Liquid Ocelot, arms folded, standing atop Haven’s bridge, gazing down at the calm, tranquil sea.
There were no sounds of battle; no gunfire, no shouts. Only Mei Ling’s booming voice echoed from Missouri’s loudspeakers, announcing the battle’s end and attempting to stop any remaining small pockets of hostilities. “Stop this pointless fight,” she declared. “This is no war.”
The low pressure front had been swept away, and the sunlight shone on the top of the bridge. The flat oval roof was covered in plates of stealth material and a layer of OctoCamo, and several transmission antennae stood like columns.
His long, black leather coat fluttering in the wind, Liquid kept his eyes on the ocean as he said, “Rise and shine, Snake.”
Snake lifted his chin from the cold floor and moved his body slightly. He was still in pain, of course, but not more than he could handle.
“Look,” Liquid said. “The war is over.”
Snake got to his knees, and then to his feet. Surprised that he had been able to do so, Snake stood on the roof of the bridge and saw the battered Missouri along with several smaller craft, moving here and there to mop up after the finished fight. A US military helicopter flew overhead.
“Why?” Snake asked.
Liquid didn’t act confused or angry about the defeat of his plans. If anything, he seemed relaxed. He just stood there, gazing at the tranquil sea, and Snake couldn’t explain why.
“If you had wanted to stop us,” Snake said, “you should have been able to.”
Any way I looked at it, a server room guarded merely by a swarm of Scarabs didn’t make sense. I supposed a gunfight among the rows of the AI’s exposed hardware would have been unworkable. But Liquid knew that the server room was his opponent’s final target. Surely he could have prepared a more suitable line of defense.
Liquid shrugged. “Stopped you? Why would I want to do that? This is just as I’d hoped things would end.”
Snake didn’t understand. If Liquid was attempting to bluff at this point, he’d be a real fool.
“Our father, Big Boss,” Liquid said, “sought to free himself from the Patriots’ chokehold. His dream was to create an army of free citizens, one that answered to no government: Outer Heaven. But he failed … because of you.”
During the two world wars of the last century, the Philosophers gained influence as an international group of people who traversed the halls of power. After World War II, the Philosophers disbanded, and the secret fortune behind the organization ended up in the hands of a former SAS major known as Zero.
Zero formed his own organization, the Patriots, whose members utilized the vast wealth of the Philosophers’ Legacy to bring one woman’s vision to the world. But what they brought about was a spiritual prison where supreme authority was maintained by means of prediction and control.
In the nineties, Big Boss sought freedom from that prison. Nine years ago, on Shadow Moses, Liquid sought freedom from biological destiny—genes. And five years ago, in Manhattan, Liquid and Solid’s brother Solidus sought freedom from the Patriots’ information control—memes.
All of this, until this moment, was nothing more than a process of trial and error resulting in Haven.
Everything until now had been a fight for freedom; resistance against any power attempting to restrict and belittle the human spirit within a confined narrative.
“Now we are free,” Liquid said, “from the Sons of the Patriots, the ultimate form of external control imposed on the Patriots’ soldiers. Free from FOXDIE. Free from the System. Free from ID control. Our minds free from their prisons.”
Suddenly, Liquid thrust a finger at his cursed brother. Snake knew immediately what the action meant.
A part of Snake was not yet free, and a part of Liquid was yet imprisoned: the other’s very existence. The bloodline of Snakes remained upon the earth.
“This is it, brother,” Liquid said. “Our final moment. The battle has ended, but we are not yet free. The war is over, but we still have a score to settle.”
Liquid discarded his coat. Caught in the breeze, it fluttered away. Liquid’s bare upper body, now revealed, remained surprisingly muscular for the man’s seventy-some years. Layers of exposed tendons were visible where Frank had severed his right arm. But the tissues weren’t red and pulsing with life. They were synthetic, part of an augmented artificial limb, built from the same cybernetic technology as Frank’s and Raiden’s exoskeletal bodies.
At the end of the artificial arm, Liquid’s hand balled into a fist. Liquid brought the fist to his chest and took a fighting stance.
I wondered what had happened to Liquid Snake’s right arm, the arm that had taken over Ocelot’s consciousness.
Snake raised his fists as best he could given his burns and injuries, and the two men measured their distance.
“Show me what you’ve got, Snake!”
Snake obeyed and charged at Liquid full speed. Liquid, stunned at the sudden, wild attack, took the tackle in the chest, and said, “Not bad!”
Snake, at his opponent’s chest, jerked his head up, catching Liquid at the bottom of his chin, then followed up with a shoulder to the ribcage. Liquid had been overtaken at the very start, but he managed to shake Snake off and jab an elbow into his brother’s back.
The impact penetrated through to lungs and gut and knocked the air out of Snake. For a brief moment, his guard slackened. Liquid seized the opportunity and delivered a knee strike. Snake recoiled in pain. His head cocked back, and in that instant, Liquid’s artificial elbow connected with his burned left cheek and sent him reeling.
Pressing the attack, Liquid launched into a roundhouse kick, but before the centripetal force could accelerate the tip of his foot into the tender muscles of Snake’s side, Snake jumped back.
The other time was in a place like this. Snake closed distance and struck at Liquid with everything he had. Chest, stomach, back, face. His elbows and forearms sunk into every bit of flesh they could find.
Nine years ago, Snake and Liquid’s final battle on Moses Island, a masterful display of hand-to-hand combat, had been atop a similar giant platform. Back then, the REX’s back had been the arena, and now it was on the back of a whale, but both times the two had stood on colossal weapons armed with the latest technology and punched at each other with their primitive fists.
No, it wasn’t just that time. There was also that fistfight with Cyborg Ninja in the Moses facility. And the first time he exchanged blows with Frank, in the Zanzibar Land minefield. Just like then, this contest brimmed with a peculiar vigor—the sportlike purity of two men striking at each other, without malice or murderous intent, to prove each other’s being.
As they pummeled each other, and as they wrecked each other’s faces, Snake—and this may sound strange—began to forgive Liquid. Each strike was a display of his forgiveness.
Snake neared the place Naomi had already reached.
To find complete forgiveness and acceptance.
With his half-ruined arms, Snake reached out to that land.
Then came the final punch. Snake’s fist brushed past Liquid’s. Almost simultaneously, each man’s cheek was smashed by the other’s clenched hand.
Neither brother could move. Almost as if they were checking each other’s temperature, each man’s fist remained embedded in the cheek it had struck. After an endless moment, one figure fell slowly backward.
One man stood, and one man dropped. Fate had reached its end.
Here, at the last, no clear difference was to be found between victory and defeat.
“This is only the beginning, Snake.”
Liquid lay on Haven’s bridge, his face to the sky. His body pulverized by Snake, Liquid’s voice was feeble, and Snake strained his old, worn-out ears to listen.
“America will descend into chaos. It’ll be the Wild West all over again. No law, no order. Fire will spread across the world.”
What Snake had destroyed was not only a prison, but the chains that tethered the beasts called humans. The Patriots had attempted to restrict and control the world. They had guided and used the people, so each was compelled to action under the pretense of free will.
Yet in a certain way, the Patriot AIs were only possible as a projection of ourselves. The AIs, as the ultimate storytellers depicting the world around us, were our very own norms, customs, and lives.
People, as a group, followed customs without thought. That was the true stratgey of the Patriots.
“Through battle the people will know the fullness of life. At last, our father’s will, Outer Heaven, is complete.”
Liquid beamed proudly. The new era, the world Big Boss had sought, was to be created by his sons, Liquid and Solid, the two Snakes.
Big Boss reviled no place more than he did heaven. Absolute peace and total happiness only came about by the theft of thought, action, and responsibility. He deeply felt it his duty to break the reign of heaven, the world of Major Zero and the Patriots—that grotesque heaven he himself had helped create.
Big Boss fought against the system of control he had unknowingly helped build. He had taken responsibility for what he had begun. Unwittingly, Snake had repeated his father’s battles.
Liquid whispered, “Somewhere out there, I know he’s laughing.”
His eyes were distant, perhaps not seeing Snake any longer. He stared blankly at the sky, as if searching for JD, still up there, in the coldness of space, having lost its heartbeat of information.
“We are beasts created by man,” he said. “Unless the light is extinguished, the shadows will remain. As long as there is light, erasing shadows is futile.”
Something was odd about Liquid—at least as far as anything could be considered odd about a man who had hijacked someone else’s body. He now gave the peculiar impression that he wasn’t being himself—like an actor losing his grasp on his role.
“I am Liquid’s doppelgänger. And you are Big Boss’s,” Liquid said, then thrust his trembling hands toward Snake. “You’re your father’s son. You’re … pretty good.”
A small sound left his throat, and his arms fell to the floor.
Snake knelt beside Liquid and put his fingers to the man’s neck. He could feel the body losing warmth, and the carotid artery delivered no blood from Liquid’s heart to his brain.
Snake lifted his hand and touched Liquid’s cheek. He closed his brother’s open eyes.
You don’t need to see anymore. No more binds, no more fate.
This was Snake’s final parting from his cursed brother.