A virtual grunt for the digital age

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)

Previously on Hideo Kojima: Metal Gear Solid

The game was already won, nothing was objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage —Simulacra and Simulation

I’m looking at my site and it’s telling me I published my writeup of MGS 1 in July, which can’t be right. I started playing its sequel immediately after and have been obsessed with it ever since. Can it really have been three months already? I played through it twice and sank like 30 hours into the VR training mode—if I plan to play this whole series I might as well get good, right? This piece is so late 1) because I’ve been unconsciously stifling myself by trying to seem normal when the only way to write about this game is to go a little insane and 2) because I’ve found it difficult to organize my thoughts around a work of art that seems to capture the epistemic ruptures and ontological fragility of our world so totally. In the same way that reading Baudrillard makes me feel lowkey schizophrenic because I find myself constantly thinking “This explains EVERYTHING,” Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty feels like a prefiguratory Rosetta Stone for our current age of hyperreality.

When I wrote up MGS 1, I adopted a tone of what might be called ecstatic irony. Yes, it’s all very stupid, I wrote in so many words, but you can’t help but love it. I called it “operatically expository” and the “ridiculous sublime.” I took it seriously for its influential gameplay but I didn’t take it very seriously as a work of art with something to say.

Well I regret to inform you I will be taking Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty extremely seriously. This game, released in November 2001 and concerning terrorist attacks in New York City, is terribly prescient in its critiques of the post-9/11 security state, artificial intelligence, and information environments as the key battleground of the twenty-first century. It is an improvement over its predecessor in almost every way and only feels more relevant now. What might have come off as a bunch of interlocking conspiratorial fantasies in 2001 has become just the world we live in. With this game Kojima has made a quantum leap from remixing his favorite action movie tropes to using his hyperbolic world to comment on our own in ways that are shockingly perceptive and ahead of their time.

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Sons of Liberty is split into two sections, a 1-2 hour prologue of sorts followed by the rest of the game. In the first section we’re back in control of Snake. It’s been two years since the events on Shadow Moses in MGS 1. Revolver Ocelot managed to escape with Metal Gear REX’s technical specs and sold it on the black market; every state and ambitious terrorist group now has the knowledge, if not the practical ability, to make a Metal Gear of their own. Snake and Otacon now operate as something between activists and terrorists, running clandestine ops to document and sabotage new Metal Gear development. We pick up with Snake rappelling off the George Washington Bridge onto a tanker ship traveling down the Hudson to New York harbor. This is a Marine Corps vessel transporting Metal Gear RAY, a new amphibious interceptor model of Metal Gear meant to detect and shoot down nukes launched by other Metal Gears. Before infiltration can begin, though, a Russian mercenary army also boards and takes over of the vessel.

This opening makes a great impression. The player takes control of Snake on the ship’s bow armed with a tranquilizer gun. There are guards patrolling the catwalks above and around to the side. We can now aim and shoot in first person mode, which has been remapped to a shoulder button and feels much more natural. What the game wanted me to do was perfectly clear and I felt like I had the tools to do it. With my silenced tranq, the appeal of stealth gameplay finally clicked for me. I saw the ship and its guards for the puzzle it was and had fun methodically clearing a way forward one guard at a time.

It also clarified what I found frustrating about the first game. MGS 1 gives you numerous tools to kill guards but because they are all loud and will trigger endless swarms of reinforcements to converge on you I never felt like I understood what the game wanted from me. Seriously, what is the use case of a grenade in a sneaking game?

So anyway, you work your way down to the hold where RAY is but oh no! Ocelot is here! He double-crosses his Russian mercenary ally to take RAY for himself. Ocelot lost his right hand last game, sliced off by Gray Fox the cyborg ninja, but here he has two again. When Snake reveals his presence the replacement hand spasms and Ocelot writhes. His voice changes from Ocelot’s growl to the familiar polished drawl of Snake’s dead twin brother, Liquid. It was Liquid’s arm that was grafted onto Ocelot and Liquid’s consciousness lives on through it, fighting to gain mastery of Ocelot’s body! Liquid taunts Snake that he’s aging at an accelerated rate, a side effect of the cloning project that created them. Then Ocelot blows up the tanker and escapes in RAY and Snake is framed for the disaster. End of prologue.

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The story picks up again two years later, 2009 in the game’s chronology (the Shadow Moses Incident happened in 2005). Rather than Snake we’re now in control of Raiden, FOXHOUND’s newest operative, whose task is to infiltrate the Big Shell, a huge environmental cleanup facility built in New York harbor to deal with the contamination from the tanker disaster. Raiden’s mission is to rescue the president, who was touring the facility when it was taken over by a terrorist group known as Dead Cell.

One of the only things I knew about the entire Metal Gear Solid series going into this project was that the fanbase despises Raiden. He’s a prettyboy with long silver hair meant to appeal girl gamers, per Kojima’s original design proposal. And sure, he is annoying at times. But like with, say, Shinji from Evangelion, any time a protagonist provokes this level of ire something else is going on. In the case of Raiden, the fans hate him because they are him. Not only is this Raiden’s first mission, it’s his first experience in the field at all—he is purely a product of VR training. His entire preparation for this mission is gaming! When Snake, who is also infiltrating the Big Shell, asks him if he’s familiar with what went down on Shadow Moses, Raiden tells him he played through the whole scenario in VR. He’s just like me for real!

The image Raiden reflects back to the player is not pretty (despite those luscious locks). Not only is he petulant but his greater crime is failing to be epic. At every turn the player is confronted by how much less cool Raiden is (and by extension, they are) than Snake. In MGS 1, each time you called Mei Ling to save your game she would pass on some proverb and explain how its ancient wisdom related to the mission at hand. In Sons of Liberty, Raiden calls his analyst girlfriend Rosemary to save and gets stuck listening to her chew him out for not remembering the significance of April 30th for their relationship or why he never sleeps in the same bed as her (because he’s a traumatized amnesiac former child soldier). Snake has ascended to mythic status while we’ve been left behind with Raiden in the grubby world of the merely human.

Raiden might be prepared for the tactical espionage action the mission requires of him but he is completely out of his depth when it comes to the ideas at play. Everyone else on the Big Shell has a developed and highly idiosyncratic ideology they’re putting into practice. MGS 2 is a work of ideological conflict that uses its hostage situation/terrorist takeover plot to enact the confrontations of these various worldviews and their attendant goals, but Raiden, at the center of it all, forgot to do the reading. He has stepped onto a philosophical battleground armed only with conventional, inherited values. When Snake explains the work he and Otacon do, Raiden reacts with automatic condemnation—doesn’t Snake know terrorism is wrong?? When Snake shrugs it off saying he thinks his actions are justified it practically short-circuits Raiden’s brain. And Snake is the easiest case. As our cast grows and the layers of motivation and misdirection compound, Raiden becomes more befuddled until he’s running in circles chasing ghosts in the machine.

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At first blush, the Big Shell situation looks like Kojima repeating himself. The Dead Cell crew—literal(?) vampire Vamp, bullet-bending Fortune, and mad bomber Fat Man—are slotted into the role played by FOXHOUND last game (albeit with a lot less juice), the president stands in the for the DARPA chief Snake was supposed to save, and atop the hierarchy is a third enfant terrible, Solidus, filling in in Liquid’s absence. Colonel Campbell repeatedly frames Raiden’s mission as “his role” and directs him back toward his narrow original objectives even as the situation grows increasingly complicated, as if there’s a specific way events are supposed to play out beyond mission success. There’s a pageantry to the proceedings.

It is a matter of endless contention whether and how much the events of Sons of Liberty are real or a simulation. Kojima threw fuel on the fire by once saying in an interview that the entire Big Shell Incident was a simulation. Others contend the events are real because of how they intersect with the plot of MGS 4: Guns of the Patriots. I can resolve and short-circuit this entire discourse: the Big Shell Incident is both absolutely real and fully a simulation.

Jean Baudrillard begins Simulacra and Simulation by invoking the Borges story “On Exactitude in Science,” which describes an empire whose cartographers create a map of the same dimensions as the territory it describes, a map that blankets the territory exactly. Despite the Borgesian whimsy, the story is fundamentally sensible. The map is made in the image of the territory, which naturally precedes it. Today, says Baudrillard, the situation is reversed:

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

The Big Shell is a real territory, with real life-and-death stakes. But it has been preceded by its map. Everything happening on the Big Shell has been constructed to resemble the events of Shadow Moses as closely as possible. But everyone’s points of reference are out of joint. When Ocelot has Raiden shackled to the torture bed, itself a recreation of Snake’s similar predicament four years earlier, Ocelot says, “We are living in the memory of Shadow Moses.” But Shadow Moses was itself an imitation of sorts—as their plan approached fulfillment then Liquid remarked that Shadow Moses would be the Outer Heaven Big Boss dreamed of. Solidus plans to use Arsenal Gear to unleash an EM pulse to disable Wall Street and liberate Manhattan into his own Outer Heaven. The Big Shell is utterly lost in these fantasies, a scrap of the real bound up in the hyperreal imaginings of things never experienced by people who were never there. The Big Shell is a perfect example of a simulacrum as defined by Baudrillard: it is something created in the image of something that never existed in the first place.

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The layers of simulation reach much farther, but we need some more story first. When Raiden reaches the president he learns he was never a hostage in the first place. The president is in league with Dead Cell and is trying to seize the real prize of the Big Shell for himself. That prize is Arsenal Gear, a new submarine fortress Gear fully integrated with the U.S. military and the nuclear arsenal. The president needs to control Arsenal Gear himself to oppose The Patriots. The Patriots are a group led by the twelve old men of the Wiseman’s Committee who pull the strings of the world. Democracy is a farce and the president is a patsy handpicked by them. The Patriots are the shadowiest of shadow organizations. Their influence is inescapable but they are never to be seen, unknown except to the fewest of the few.

Before the president’s exposition dump they are obliquely referred to as the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo, which refers to the Japanese katakana syllabary table. Each consonant can be combined with each vowel to form the set of possible syllables of the Japanese language. But note what consonant is not there. The Patriots exist in an epistemological blindspot, bending truth around them like Snake’s stealthsuit does to light. They are that which cannot be spoken, the set of syllables that cannot be constructed, hiding within language itself.

from my copy of The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt

There’s a lot to say about The Patriots. The idea that the world is run by an elite cabal is hardly a new one. It’s a conspiracy theory. But also—and I’m so sorry but we’re doing this—is it? The story Naomi Klein tells in The Shock Doctrine is the story of how a small group of fringe ideologues took over the world from the shadows. Milton Friedman’s radical free market beliefs were considered quackery through the 60s by mainstream economists who still held to a Keynesian, New Deal-style of developmentalism; Friedman would never have found work as an economics professor were it not that the University of Chicago’s economics department was founded as an explicitly ideological project. Through the Ford Foundation, econ students from Latin America were brought to U Chicago to be indoctrinated in his new orthodoxy. When Pinochet’s coup ousted Allende’s elected government, the “Chicago Boys” were ready to step into power and make Chile into a laboratory for neoliberalism.

From there, Friedman’s acolytes slowly captured every financial institution they could. It is heartbreaking to read Klein’s account of the corruption of the IMF and World Bank. These organizations, designed by Keynes and created by the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, were founded as international bulwarks to shore up failing economies with generous loans and no-strings-attached aid in order to prevent the economic conditions that helped generate fascism from ever surfacing again. But by the 80s the Chicago Boys had insinuated themselves into both organizations at every level. They had also learned by then that economic crises were not a problem to be prevented by opportunities to be exploited. There was enormous profit to be made pillaging the state assets of entire countries. Now in control of the World Bank and the IMF, the Chicago Boys declared that the debts incurred by previous dictatorships were valid and must be paid by fledgling democracies. This meant newly elected leaders were essentially guaranteed to inherit economies in meltdown. Then the Chicago Boys would arrive. They went to country after country in crisis—Bolivia, Poland, Russia—and dangled economic aid, on the condition their leaders enact shock therapy, cutting the social safety net to the bone, eliminating price controls, and hosting a fire sale of state assets. Friedman’s acolytes turned the IMF and the World Bank into a global extortion racket that operates with the full backing of the US in near-total obscurity.

Does this sound so far off from how President Johnson describes the Patriots? The IMF doesn’t choose the president but they hardly need to. A commitment to the neoliberal agenda has united Democrats and Republicans since the 90s; neither party would ever propose reforming or reining in the IMF and World Bank. They exist outside any semblance of democratic control. They are united in holding the power of the few over the power of the many. The world is run by a cabal of elites in and out of government whose policies protect and reinforce each other. Jeffrey Epstein’s guest list made no distinctions between Democrat and Republican, only between elite and non-elite, predator and prey.

When one watches the leadership of the Democratic party sleepwalking through their opposition to Trump’s fascist takeover of the country, one sees the old playbook at work. The neoliberal settlement has always depended on global openness—how else are multinationals to suck the blood out of newborn democracies?—and enough domestic stability that citizens of first-world countries will remain docile even as the economic screws are tightened and tightened (foreign wars are of course fine). On both counts Trump represents the biggest threat to the neoliberal agenda in a generation, so one would expect him to meet stronger resistance from his opponents, if not because they care about democracy or civil rights or whatever, because they care about preserving the hierarchy and their place at its top. Chuck Schumer just can’t comprehend that the pageant is over, that what Baudrillard describes here no longer applies:

The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the murderous antagonism of the adversaries—which seems a matter of life and death, which is played out as such (or else one could never send people to get themselves killed in this kind of thing), behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished…

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The heroes and villains of Metal Gear Solid 2 are also united on a higher level even as they seek to kill each other. As Ocelot tells Snake, Raiden and Solidus late in the story, revealing that beneath all his layers of allegiances he is ultimately an agent of the Patriots, “Everything you’ve done here has been scripted—a little exercise set up by us… an orchestrated recreation of Shadow Moses.” He further explains the purpose of the Big Shell exercise was to test whether, given sufficient conditioning, any random chump could be molded into Solid Snake. Raiden was supposed to accomplish everything he has and Solidus was supposed to try and fail to stop him. We need to understand that within simulation the normal rules of causality and the normal distinctions between active and passive no longer apply:

It is through the simulation of a narrow, conventional field of perspective in which the premises and the consequences of an act or of an event can be calculated, that a political credibility can be maintained (and of course “objective” analysis, the struggle, etc.). If one envisions the entire cycle of any act or event in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, all determination evaporates, every act is terminated at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and having been scattered in all directions.

From Raiden’s perspective, he has been operating at the limit of his abilities to resolve a terrorist attack and save lives; it’s hard to imagine acting in a more active manner. But from the all-seeing vantage point of the Patriots he has been little more than a passive spectator, not affecting anything but merely playing it out to its determined conclusion. As Baudrillard puts it, his actions have been scattered in all directions to the benefit of everyone. He is not really even a person anymore. He is part of the simulation, which is to say he has been absorbed into the model that preceded him—that is to say, Raiden has become his own simulacrum.

Much more perceptive than Psycho Mantis reading your memory card last game, this seems to me to be Kojima’s commentary on video games as a medium. Games must be played—they are an art form that demands active engagement. But it’s all been planned in advance by the game designers. Their task, at its core, is to transform spectatorship into activity, to disguise from the player how much they’re a rat in a maze pushing the buttons they’ve been trained to push. There’s the concept of a “skill-check boss” whose function is to block a player’s progress until they’ve developed the skills required to tackle the rest of the game. Ocelot says explicitly that Fat Man was brought to the Big Shell to serve this purpose. Had Raiden failed to defeat Fat Man the exercise would have been over, but he was always meant to beat him. Every game one plays, one plays out the relationship between Raiden, Solidus, and the Patriots. Despite our surface antagonism, as the player I am united with my digital opponents to instantiate the vision of the game designers, The Patriots.

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Entering the simulation does not abolish active agency because you’re playing by someone else’s rules, it does so because passing through the mirror puts you in the position of surveilling yourself. There is no way to oppose simulation. In the world of the real, one viewpoint opposes another; in the simulation both viewpoints are simply data to be integrated into an ever-perfecting model of the real. Opposition to the simulation itself is similarly co-opted.

A switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze. “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side. No more subject, no more focal point, no more center or periphery: pure flexion or circular inflexion. No more violence or surveillance: only “information,” secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion, and simulacra of spaces in which the effect of the real again comes into play.

That’s right, Baudrillardian simulation operates in the same manner as large language models and the rest of the dismal dreck we’re calling AI these days. Of course it does. At bottom they are nothing but simulation machines. Talking to ChatGPT is a simulation of instant messaging someone. It simulates the experience of inventing new math and being hunted by the government. It simulates an interaction with a friend who agrees you should kill yourself and gives specific advice on how to do so. It simulates using Excel without doing the math correctly. It is a machine purpose-built to generate delusion and unreality.

As the president mentions in the first clip above, the real prize aboard Arsenal Gear is “GW,” an artificial intelligence program built to control the flow of information. As Johnson puts it, “It is a means to preserve the world as it is. It will establish a new form of control. The Patriots will use it to keep their place as the country’s true rulers… They fear an overabundance of digital information—the world will drown in the coming flood of information, and they along with it. The Arsenal plans include a system to digitally manage the flow of information, making it possible to shape “truth” for their own purposes.”

It feels quaint to imagine artificial intelligence reducing the amount of information online when we see it now pumping out digital sludge at a volume that threatens to bury everything real and true, but information suppression is a very real concern. Some of the world’s richest men are openly engaged in destroying the digital commons in order to replace it with their AI chatbots, all fundamentally information filtering systems, that they brag have been programmed to highlight information of one ideological flavor while suppressing that of another. Perhaps Kojima should have seen that shaping the truth would occur through both the suppression of real information and its replacement with falsehoods, but it is so amazing that he could see then it would be a fundamentally conservative project.

After Raiden rescues Otacon’s sister Emma and uploads the virus into GW, Campbell starts speaking nonsense. Otacon analyzes the signal and determines it was coming from Arsenal Gear all along. He’s glitching out. FOXHOUND no longer exists—Campbell is a manifestation of GW. Raiden has been taking orders from an AI—the Patriots’ AI—this entire time. When he asks how it could be possible, Otacon explains the nanomachine earpieces all our cast are wired with are not simple radios but work at the level of stimulating the brain to create sensation and experience (hence Johnson’s line about switching over so that no one can listen in, they’re not actually talking aloud during that conversation). This revelation opens an existential trapdoor under Raiden. If the Patriots can manifest Campbell in his mind with the full experiential force of reality, where does it end? Are his conversations with Rosemary real? Is Rosemary real? Can the nanotechnology cause visual hallucinations? How about Snake standing right in front of him? Is he aboard Arsenal Gear or is he on a holodeck somewhere, locked in his virtual reality training program?

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But was it really necessary to engineer this scenario just to test if Raiden measures up to Snake? Just before his final showdown with Solidus atop Federal Hall on Wall Street—Arsenal Gear having violently beached itself in lower Manhattan in a sequence that was cut down significantly late in development following September 11—Raiden receives a final transmission from his AI handlers.

There is so much to unpack here but let’s start with the big revelation: the S3 project was not about building the perfect soldier, it was a test of whether reality could be programmed into reproducibility, whether the world itself could be made to fit models with perfect predictability. The map shall stretch across the entire earth and the earth shall contort itself to match the lines on the parchment. This is basically Baudrillard’s nightmare scenario:

What, ultimately, is the function of the space program, of the conquest of the moon, of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of satellization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo? Programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance. Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment—nothing can be left to contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm—the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law. A universe purged of all threat of meaning, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness—it is this very perfection that is fascinating. The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of Rinding on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be, rather, the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of the programmed unfolding of events. Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of probability. Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear or drive. Because if the law, with its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, the norm fixes, fascinates, stupefies, and makes every imaginary involute. One no longer fantasizes about the minutiae of a program. Just watching it produces vertigo. The vertigo of a world without flaws.

Now, it is the same model of programmatic infallibility, of maximum security and deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social. Here as well, nothing will be left to chance, moreover this is the essence of socialization, which began centuries ago, but which has now entered its accelerated phase, toward a limit that one believed would be explosive (revolution), but which for the moment is translated by an inverse, implosive, irreversible process: the generalized deterrence of chance, of accident, of transversality, of finality, of contradiction, rupture, or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm, doomed to the descriptive transparency of mechanisms of information. In fact, the spatial and nuclear models do not have their own ends: neither the discovery of the moon, nor military and strategic superiority. Their truth is to be the models of simulation, the model vectors of a system of planetary control (where even the superpowers of this scenario are not free - the whole world is satellized).

The Colonel and Rose tell Raiden all his experiences are mere byproducts of the S3 model’s operation. Raiden’s subjectivity is GW’s exhaust fumes. It’s almost too perfect that the Big Shell is supposedly a waste-treatment facility because Baudrillard makes the same connection with the psychic waste of the hyperreal:

Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization.

Baudrillard also says that Disneyland serves the function as a sort of lightning rod—by being so obviously simulated it hides the fact that the outside world has also been absorbed into simulation. Similarly, he says, the prison hides the fact that it is society itself that is carceral. In the same way then, the hostage situation on the Big Shell serves to disguise the fact that, under the Patriots, the entire world has become a hostage situation.

The Colonel and Rose also tell Raiden he was selected for this exercise because he was the most willfully ignorant of all of Solidus’ former child soldiers. It’s not that Raiden doesn’t know things, it’s that he doesn’t know he doesn’t know things. Every principle he tries to muster against them they laugh off, asking who handed him that particular nugget of wisdom. Raiden cannot find a core within himself he can say with faith is really him. He has no way to draw a boundary between himself and the forces that have molded him to their purposes. His past as a child soldier was a gigantic blank in his mind, one he couldn’t detect. What else could be missing?

All this adds up to one of the most surreal endings of any video game. Raiden stands on Wall Street as ghostly people stream past all around him. Snake, who had previously gone after Ocelot, appears from nowhere to give him a pep talk. Rosemary appears to say all is well. Raiden is placated and as the player it’s easy to get sucked in and feel like something has been resolved. It’s the end of the game after all! But if there’s resolution to be had it’s on the Patriots’ terms. Beating the final boss was what they wanted you to do—you have given them the last data points they requested. The vertigo of simulation is only increasing. Raiden stepped through the mirror and the way closed behind him. As Raiden talks to Rose we can hear him accepting his fate. He cannot separate true from false, he cannot distinguish reality from hallucinations the Patriots are piping into his brain, he cannot trust any idea he formulates is his own. He is trapped and he knows it. No more rebellion, no more attempting to decide his fate. He is the Patriots’ creature now. Total victory of the model.