Free Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot by Project Itoh Page A

“Hey … none for me.”
    But she was already up the gangway, headed for the kitchen. Snake sighed and scratched his head.
    “How long was I out?”
    “The whole day.”
    Snake rubbed his eyelids. His voice was hoarse. “Someone saved my life.”
    “It could have been Meryl and her boys,” I said, although I didn’t know for sure. The PMC soldiers were wailing, puking, holding their heads in their hands, even trying to kill each other. It was hard to tell what was happening amid the chaos.
    “Don’t worry,” I added. “They’re doing fine.”
    But that didn’t seem to reassure Snake much.
    Groaning in pain and with a hand on his hip, Snake arose.
    “Liquid got away,” he said.
    Suddenly, he began to cough violently. He put his hands on his knees and bent over, out of breath. I put my hand on his back, and after a short while, he recovered.
    “Back there,” Snake said, “my body … just seized up all of a sudden. It wasn’t like normal. It wasn’t my joints or muscles.”
    “It looked like the PMC soldiers all went haywire en masse. I thought it might be a form of an Active Denial System. But I didn’t detect any electromagnetic aberrations. You were lucky—some of those guys’ hearts simply stopped.”
    Then Snake remembered the woman. “She was there. Naomi was at Liquid’s side. Otacon, did you see her?”
    “No,” I said. Noting Snake’s disappointed expression, I quickly added, “But you’re right. Naomi was there.” I pointed to the syringe, a white autoinjector, on my desk. “I found traces of her DNA in that syringe you were holding.”
    “So it was Naomi. Why?”
    “Here, let me show you something.”
    I sat at my computer and opened a file. Snake tottered over to look over my shoulder.
    “Right after it all happened,” I said, “I got a video mail from Naomi. It was sent to my old address. The data checks out—no viruses. The voiceprint matches Naomi’s. And I’m fairly confident the picture hasn’t been digitally synthesized either.”
    The video finished loading, and I clicked play.
    Naomi’s face filled the screen. The background was dark, but it looked like some kind of storeroom.
    “Snake, I’ll make this quick.” Naomi’s expression was urgent. She spoke in a whisper and kept looking over her shoulder. The picture was unsteady—she seemed to be recording herself with a handheld camera.
    “I’m in South America. I’ve been captured and forced to do research. It’s Liquid. His goal is to seize control of SOP—the Sons of the Patriots system that controls the soldiers. To do that, he needs to analyze the nanomachines’ structure and find out how they communicate with one another.”
    “Was the madness I saw when I faced Liquid,” Snake muttered to himself, “the result of that takeover? Did Liquid already control the System?”
    “The nanomachines currently in use by the PMCs are third generation. But their design is derived from that of the first, and the technology is still the same.”
    “The first generation?” Snake said to the screen. Drebin had said something along those lines—that the nanomachines in Snake’s body were “old nanomachines” and had caused the interference with the System and blocked him from using non-ID guns.
    “I was the one who created the first generation,” Naomi was saying. “A colony of nanomachines—part of which was FOXDIE. Nine years ago, at Shadow Moses, I injected it into your body, Snake. The technology used in FOXDIE was incorporated—inherited, really—by SOP. That’s why Liquid is making me help him hijack the System. Because I know how FOXDIE works.”
    Viruses could be thought of as machines built from molecules of DNA or RNA—machines possessing the ability to utilize the cells of living organisms to reproduce. A man-made virus was, in essence, a nanomachine, and a virus found in nature might be said to be a natural nanomachine.
    There was a loud noise on the recording, and Naomi turned. Sweat