As Snake listened to Big Boss talk, he began to feel deep pity for the tiny figure sunk into the wheelchair. Zero could not write an ending to his narrative.
Enough! Stop this here, he cried out, but the machine he’d created paid no heed. Granted new, independent life through the war economy, the storyteller had begun telling its own tale now. Zero found himself on the receiving end of the story, blasting at him, drowning out all other noise.
“Now that I’m actually face-to-face with him again,” Big Boss said, “the hatred is gone. All I feel is a deep sense of longing … and pity.”
Before Snake was a lone man beaten by his own creation. Even the mighty Patriots began with a single man. One desire, one dream, grew huge and bloated, absorbing technology, manipulating the economy, until, before he could realize it, his creation had become a beast.
He made the System, but in the end he became just another of its victims. Big Boss gazed at him with eyes filled with tenderness and lacking any shadows of enmity or ire.
“Did Zero really hate me? Or … did he fear me? It’s too late to ask him now.”
Para-Medic, Sigint, EVA, and Ocelot, the original members of the Patriots, had all passed on. Only Zero, the man who started it all, remained.
Everything had its beginning. But the world didn’t begin with “one,” but long before, in chaos. From zero. The moment zero became one was the moment the world sprang to life. One became two, two became ten, and ten became one hundred.
Taking it all back to one would solve nothing. As long as Zero remained, one would eventually grow to one hundred again.
“Our goal was to erase Zero.”
Big Boss closed his eyes and patted Zero’s head as a nurturing father would his son. Occasionally, the wheelchair’s life-support and nursing care systems made a sound as the suction-assisted equipment retrieved Zero’s waste. His cranium had contracted, and his skin had wrinkled; his face resembled that of a newborn.
Big Boss crouched in front of Zero. Staring closely into that face, he softly spoke.
“We have our sins.”
By we, he didn’t mean Snake. Without realizing it, he had grouped himself with Zero, his former commander, comrade-in-arms, and the mortal enemy who had imprisoned him—and the world.
“And for that reason, I’m taking it upon myself to send Zero back to nothing.”
Big Boss reached behind the wheelchair and switched off the life-support system. The old man’s eyelids faintly trembled. Big Boss stood, turned his back on his slowly dying friend, and started to walk back toward The Boss’s grave.
A steady electronic tone could faintly be heard—the life support’s warning alarm, turned down to its lowest volume, was Zero’s loudest death cry.
What had ended? An old man, long past seeing, hearing, and possibly thinking, had been freed from a pointless existence. Snake couldn’t understand how that signified an ending to anything. Hadn’t this old man already been destroyed by his own creation?
By the time he realized it, everything important had ended.
Snake said to Big Boss’s back, “You going back to zero as well?”
Big Boss froze in place, then looked over his shoulder at Snake and said, “You erased me two times before. Today will mark the third. The FOXDIE Zero planted in you has already begun eating away at my body.”
It couldn’t—
Then in an instant, Snake put the pieces together.
The FOXDIE colony Naomi found swimming in Snake’s blood in South America had contained two variant strains. One was what remained of the FOXDIE virus he had been injected with on Shadow Moses. Its genetic pattern to distinguish the virus’s targets had eroded and threatened to spread death indiscriminately to the people of the world. The other was a new, unknown FOXDIE that had been recently injected into Snake by somebody—possibly Drebin.
I’ve been used again, Snake realized. The orders he had been given at Shadow Moses—to eliminate the terrorists and intercept the nuclear weapon—were only a lie to deliver the virus into the captured facility.
“Truth is,” Big Boss said, “the FOXDIE in you killed EVA and Ocelot. Naomi told me everything.”
At the end, Big Boss’s voice cracked and grew weak and hoarse. Just as Snake noticed something was wrong, Big Boss fell to his knees amid the sea of white flowers and clutched at his chest with his right hand.
Snake ran to him and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Big Boss’s face had turned pale, his aura of vigor vanished like an illusion. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Big Boss gritted his teeth through the pain in his chest.
Snake knew what was happening.
This man had been his commander and his sworn enemy. He was Snake’s original, his father and brother. And now he was dying before Snake’s eyes.
“They did it again. They used you to kill me. The Patriots … no, their proxies. To bury us, they did it again. In the end, they’re a program, only capable of repeating the same pattern over and over again.”
Through the pain, Big Boss forced out a wry laugh. Snake had kneeled beside him, and he put his hand on his son’s shoulder and summoned the strength to stand again.
“Do me a favor, will you? Take me over to her. To The Boss.”
Snake was nonplussed, unable to deal with the indescribable emotion that welled up within him, as the man he’d only known as an enemy asked for his aid. For a moment he remained unable to move, peering into Big Boss’s eyes.
Yes, he was Snake’s enemy, but he was also Snake’s father.
Snake didn’t know his father. He had been raised by many guardians, but none he ever considered his real parents. He was never abused or treated dispassionately. Rather, his surrogate parents had handled him with the utmost care. The young child was astutely aware that all of the love, and all of the severity, that as his parents they afforded him, was entirely calculated.
Now that I consider it, his upbringing followed the Patriots’ playbook completely, just as Raiden had experienced. Through a manufactured narrative and environment, Snake had been put into the role of the child.
Big Boss, who had gone off the Patriots’ script, appeared before Snake as an enemy—a wall to be overcome, a constant presence binding him. Who could fill that role but a father? And wouldn’t a father have the responsibility to fill it? Unknowingly, Snake and Big Boss had begun building their relationship as father and son.