As Big Boss told Ocelot’s tale, something about him seemed lonely.
The two men were united by the depth of their losses; they were comrades in arms. They had helped give form to Zero’s twisted delusions and paranoid worldview, and they would gladly pay whatever price to undo their misdeed. And Big Boss and Ocelot paid dearly.
Now Big Boss reached the source of his sins.
“It all started with him … Zero.”
Snake looked in the direction of Big Boss’s gaze. A small distance from the rows of gravestones, an old man was sitting in a wheelchair. The stars-of-Bethlehem danced in the breeze like snowflakes, and beyond them he looked sad and lonesome; desolate.
As Snake followed Big Boss to the man in the wheelchair, all he sensed was emptiness. The old man’s face was covered with so many liver spots as to have been painted with them, and his wrinkles were ragged and deep enough to be called trenches. Whatever his face had been was buried far beneath. What remained of his eyes were hidden beneath encroaching eyelids; he couldn’t see anything now. An oxygen mask strapped to his face forced air into his body.
Snake felt deep sadness upon seeing that a human being could age that much. Nothing was more precious than life, but nothing was more ugly than living too long.
Big Boss gently rested his hand on the man’s shoulder. The old man’s profile had long since ceased to resemble anything human. I doubt he wanted this for himself, to live this long. Zero wasn’t the type to cling to life. But he had felt too much responsibility, and its flip side, suspicion, to die at peace.
Unable to trust the future to later generations, Zero was a lonesome man who carried everything by himself. Unable to believe in anyone else, he built a world of complete control, and to maintain that world, he kept living. Such was the only choice left to this visionary. His fate now, as a wrinkled ball of flesh taking feeble breaths from the oxygen tank on his wheelchair, was torture, cruel and meaningless.
Big Boss tenderly looked into the face of the man who had once been his commander and said, “Zero grew old, and by the end, his Patriots were being run by a network without shape or form.”
“What do you mean without shape or form?” Snake asked.
“The proxies were only one small part of the vast cycle that Zero created. The corporations, for-profits, and research institutions that comprise the military-industrial complex were part of it too. They operated on budgets automatically allotted to them by the proxies—accounts maintained by the Patriots. The network covered everything from weapons R&D and investment to production and marketing. It encompassed the people, the companies—even the laws that protect them. Politics and economics became nothing more than iterations of the same oppressively uniform system. I don’t think anyone realized that it was all a setup—a mere set of norms. The Patriots were those norms—a neural network reduced to its simplest form.”
The Patriots had no room for reform or individual will. A type of cold universality formed the arteries of the Patriots’ information bloodstream; a pattern from the flow of information brought visible by the political and economic networks that had gained complexity through advances in transportation, distribution, and communication. On the outside, the pattern seemed too complex to predict, but in reality its behavior was deterministic and followed a simple equation.
But a new pattern emerged. The stream of information suddenly diverged and took an entirely new course. The Patriots’ network was to undergo a radical change; to go from their quiet existence to that of a primitive life-form, endlessly dividing and combining, and reproducing and propagating without limit.
A life brought on by Zero’s delusions of a unified state.
A life called war.
The Patriots, now driven by Zero’s obsession to unify the human consciousness, were quickly overcome by the new meme of the war economy. With the help of several catalysts—including the political cause of creating a cleaner, safer battlefield, and the move toward military privatization to reduce administrative costs—the war economy spread worldwide.
By then, the System was no longer being steered by Zero’s will—or anyone else’s.
Theirs was a world without ideologies, principles, or ideals—or even the loyalty The Boss had so treasured—and decided by the movement of intangible capital. The norms, intended by Zero to be only proxies, began to reproduce and take on a life of their own—the life of the war economy.
SOP, Gekko, ID guns, and more—these technologies appeared on the surface to have been developed by separate companies. But all had been directed into the world by the Patriots AIs, diverting funds from the Philosophers’ Legacy to research groups and the equity investors backing them.
“But,” Big Boss said, “with the American system in a state of collapse, the Patriots’ society has reverted to a blank slate.”
Big Boss gazed across the cemetery. The unvisited burial ground was the husk of the old, fallen world. Those interred within were soldiers who died in the old wars. Some had fought as agents of the Patriots, and some had fought against them.
“This man was the source of everything,” Big Boss said.
He removed his hand from Zero’s shoulder and stared at the man who had been the center of it all. He was the center of the world, yet possessed no recorded citizenship. To hide from assassinations and terrorist plots, he had thoroughly erased all traces of himself.
Thanks to Ocelot, EVA, and Naomi’s plans, the moment we uploaded the worm cluster to Haven’s servers, and GW manifested physically in the Patriots’ network, JD revealed Zero’s location, which was information only the head AI knew. Ocelot, EVA, and Naomi had given their lives for that moment—to guide Snake and his team along the proper path.
One will. One thought.
Zero had tried to rewrite the world to bring all its peoples to his vision.
“And he doesn’t even realize it. He’s completely unaware of the fact that he led the world to the brink of ruin. He’s practically dead.”
Of course, the writer couldn’t appear in his own story.
The world Zero wrote had no place for him. His was the loneliness of a writer; the loneliness of the creator of stories. That very loneliness transformed the world—his creation—to a desolate, sad backdrop.
And so the old man stopped writing the story himself. Zero built an automated system to produce the narrative he desired. Such was his only option; he had grown weary of aging and of storytelling. I speak, therefore the world is. If he stopped narrating, all his efforts spent toward the unified world would go up in smoke.