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I have been wanting to do-over this for about the zillionth time in order to get more out of the politics of it - I keep finding more and more things that need to be examined rather than simply mentioned in passing. Also, it is stupidly easy to turn absolutely anyone into an MGS character.
This is seriously bad and flows horribly but at least the last line is legit IC.
M.A.D. (stop worrying)
No man looks his best when pulled straight out of the tropics. Operative 18's hair hung in sweat-set clumps around his face, and his skin was a discoloured mess of sunburn stripes and insect bites and patches of bronze. He was worn and tatty but his eyes were alive with stories - most of which, Ocelot knew from prior experience, would be untrue - and even with his tiny body slumped in a hard briefing room chair, his gestures seemed irritatingly lively and contented. O18 was an alleycat in a world of silent jungle hunters, a scavenger who still lived only because he was incredibly useful.
Kazuhira's coded transmission had been quite clear, but Ocelot's insatiable craving for detail had driven him to recall an infiltrator. Operative 18 had been hiding in MSF's medical corps - he had an aversion to killing, a forgiveable flaw in a spy who was otherwise brilliant, and he'd acquitted himself well within Big Boss's recycled army though the codename he'd used there was unprofessionally ironic. A psychological assessment had assured him that O18 was stable, but sometimes prone to attempts at self-destruction; feeling invincible, perhaps he almost wanted to get caught.
"Didn't they see you leave?" he asked, as if he wasn't accustomed to how O18 operated. He didn't like to remind his spies how much he knew about them, and he approached them as if he were their equal, a fellow agent and an ally, rather than anything more fundamental. He reasoned his life might be extended by this cultivation of ignorance. Why allow people to know how much power you had over them?
"They don't remember I was ever there." O18 sighed softly. Ocelot understood; it was a safer life than most spies led, but O18 had no prospect of ever forming friendships on a mission - or enmities, and Ocelot enjoyed and valued both of those things.
O18 had been found in some hellhole slum in Eastern Europe when he was a child, and the Soviet Branch had raised him in a psychic school they maintained in D.C. as a covert act of diplomacy and science that was sadly unregarded by all the city's Cold Warriors. He spoke English fluently in that clean tone that the unworldy liked to call 'accentless'. Most of his passports said he was American. He blessedly wasn't one of the mad all-powerful psychics who were as much a danger to themselves as to their targets as to their handlers; rather, he had a strong but limited knack with the mind's suggestible faculties. He could make people sincerely believe any lie he told (and his lies were both many and flagrant), and he was capable of making small deletions from other people's memories. Like erasing his own presence. Like being a perpetual stranger.
"The reports we've received say they have a nuke." O18 nodded. Ocelot hadn't expected him to refute Kazuhira's dispatch - there were enough of the damn things around that there had always been a real possibility that they wouldn't be able to stop Big Boss from acquiring one if he'd been determined upon it. It was only surprising that it had happened so soon. How was of secondary importance. They'd investigate whatever mistake had been made later. For now he could cut to more important questions; "Just one nuke?"
"Currently, yes."
"Are they trying to acquire more?"
O18 shook his head. "They don't have control of an enrichment facility, and couldn't build one on their ocean rig. They've no immediate plans to steal another, either."
"But they could?"
"That depends on the security of the rest of the world's nukes." True enough. Big Boss was getting older, and was clearly leaning ever more on the young blood of his private army, but it would be hard to build a facility that he and his followers couldn't infiltrate. Not all nuclear nations had the ability to do so.
Until that hypothetical problem pressed itself, there was but one more remaining. "And will they use it?"
"Well now. That's a good question." Ocelot knew it was. He'd asked it. He waited patiently for O18 to elaborate on his blather. "They're acting under essentially the same considerations as any other nuclear power, but they're not any other nuclear power. It's only one nuke. If they launch, they'll lose their deterrent, but if they don't allow themselves to launch, it was never a real deterrent to begin with. They need the world to see their fingers on the red button, or it's worthless and they'll be as fragile with it as they ever were without."
"Deterrence is the ultimate prisoners' dilemma."
"In which Outer Heaven can only play the final round, yes." O18 was, unaccountably, smiling about this.
Like all Patriots in good standing, Ocelot had implanted psychic defenses and was thus completely immune to O18's bullshit, and he expected to consistently hear an above average amount of truth from those filthy lips, but he wasn't above being confounded by the man. "So that's what you've got for our masters? Games and guesswork?"
"No - no. I've got to tell you that you're all looking at it from completely the wrong perspective." Ocelot stared at him. "You're trying to figure out how far Big Boss would ever go, as if his was the sole power that mattered here. What you need to do is look at it from the point of view of the warhead."
...Ah. "You're out of your mind," he said calmly.
"Try it and then tell me that again. If you were a warhead, what would you want?"
Ocelot was not inclined to descend into O18's derangement - but the idea slid over his mind and caught in those sanded grooves inside that knew what it was for a man to think like a weapon and found it far too easy to simulate the opposite. Ocelot was a revolver. He killed with power and precision, he recoiled and was reloaded; he knew every trick; he would age into living antiquity, never becoming any less deadly than what he was; and whatever emblems adorned his surface were irrelevant to what he was.
With that in mind, he anatomised the mentality of a warhead, his eyes on O18's rosy face. He began to see its inherent logic - but he wasn't going to feel it in the obsessive way O18 patently did. Men had their odd fixations. Ocelot was indulgent of his own love of torture; others got weak over money or possessions or guns or gambling, or, strangest of all from his perspective, women.
In the illuminated slant of O18's eyes, he thought he saw a wistful romance with nuclear arms.
The stupidity of it made him angry - stupid unnecessary games, when he knew Big Boss in every way that would ever matter, the details of his mind scratched out on Ocelot's own by ceaseless study and long hours of their rough substitutes for intimacy. Yes, John could still surprise him; he learned fast, and moved faster. But Ocelot didn't need heretic meditations to understand him and his army and he pitied anyone who thought they did.
He accused in exchange for false insight. "He's got to you, hasn't he? His damnfool nuclear exile ideogogy has got into your feeble mind and turned you."
"Not nearly as hard as he's got to you!" Ocelot scowled through his transparency, feeling blood rush to his face. He could, he reminded himself, have O18 killed for this uncharacteristic flirtation with the truth. "But really now - Outer Heaven won't be unchanged by nukes any more than America is. You have to consider how being prisoners of their one-piece game is going to affect them. Him. Them."
O18 shrugged, as if to say it was all very obvious just so long as you were as mad as he was, and Ocelot felt drawn to indulge his fanciful speculation - anything but wonder what they'd driven John to, how they'd pushed him so far away and so deep into the ocean. With a nuke. John has a nuke. "So what, in your view, does the nuke want?"
O18 stared at the walls of the chamber, speaking slowly as he toyed with his thoughts. "What everything wants - and needs - is to follow their life's purpose. Nukes weren't created for deterrence. They were created to win one war and start another." And that Cold War had given them all - Patriots, spies, nukes - the very breath they needed for life. "People obsess over voluntary disarmament, test-ban treaties and the like - but all that matters, if you're playing at game-theory essentials, is whether the world has one nuke or more than one. Two nukes means mutually assured destruction. Whether they're used or not, they only ever bring stalemate. But only one nuke, one nuke can be what it was designed to be. A weapon."
"A weapon no one wants to ever use." It was a cruel god that had given men both nuclear weapons and consciences, and a capricious god that had allowed a rogue power to have even one of them.
"Quite, not least because once used you no longer have it; what's the ghost of a deterrent worth? But there's the possibility, every day, that you might use it anyway. Even if you don't intend to, another nation might move their fingers, and that's the end of all of both of you. The nuke will always be a temptation to them - warheads might make a nation powerful, but never happy. It's not in their souls."
You're insane, he thought again. Ocelot could almost hear O18's fevered imagination ticking under his sunburned scalp. He must never send him south of the twenty-fourth parallel ever again, and should probably dispose of him before his mind finally snapped. But he was damnably useful. "Do you seriously believe that so many nations are desperately scrabbling for misery?"
O18 shrugged off the very idea of believing anything. "I do think that America believes it. It's policy, stated or otherwise. They miss that simple world with only three nukes that all belonged to them, and they'll preach nonproliferation and disarmament for everyone else until they're back at that position - a few nukes, maybe only one nuke, and it's all theirs. Or they'll start to fantasise shields that keep other nukes out - any dream that will let them have nukes without having to deal with deterrence. They'll be very safe and happy. Pity it'll never happen."
"Pity indeed." Ocelot mouthed the emotion. He couldn't feel it. If he felt anything right now, it was anger that he could only reach at what he wanted through others. Could only see and know and feel via proxies, erratic ones that ran on ghostspeak and which injected too many thoughts of their own. "MSF have brought a nuke to their heaven - I think we can assume they have abandoned the pursuit of happiness."
"Haven't we all? Warheads get to everything. Having one, keeping one, means ensuring that access to it is totally under your control. What would they do, to protect it from spies and trespassers? What wouldn't they do?" He paused for a moment. "They're at an advantage, in that they're already the kind of tightly controlled military state that nuclear arms require. They don't need to silently rip up their democracy like the USA did in the McCarthy years."
"So that's what nukes want? Victory and misery and absolute control?"
"Among many of their kind? They haven't a choice but to become all that. But only one nuke - especially if you don't truly want to use it - if it's not to be used, perhaps what one nuke most wants is to be forgotten. To play out its existence as a deterrent, a nuke must be used in mutually assured destruction - or set aside for good, and that means -" he jerked his thumb to the south with uncanny, or prerehearsed, dead reckoning - "exactly what they're doing so much of at Outer Heaven; research and development of conventional weaponry. The taboo of nuclear war demands that, especially with only one warhead. Being able to rely on their other defences is the best way for Outer Heaven to ensure they'll never have to waste it."
"So you're saying you think they'd only ever launch in a retaliatory strike?"
"That would be a tidy answer to your problem, wouldn't it? Then you could simply launch twice - or launch in such a way that they couldn't retaliate. No - I'm saying that their nuke is their last resort and they won't waste it." His eyes seemed to dance again with mad, misplaced stellar fission that might, if his fixation were targeted at something less inhuman, have indicated some soft affection, even love.
Ocelot narrowed his eyes, crushed those hints of emotion out of his mental calculation - which was that Operative 18 was possessed of a lunatic visionary spirit that wasn't completely without logic or worth, and his view could be sensibly interpreted as meaning that the Patriots, and their world, were safe from the MSF nuke so long as they took care not to present opportunities, or provocations, to use it. And that that was that, and there was no return from the brink of proliferation. Not even with one, only one, warhead. "I'll report your assessment of the situation to our superiors, then."
"Thank you." O18 drummed his knuckles on the table, clearly ready to move on to the next item on his mental docket. "So," he asked. "Your place or mine?"
This is seriously bad and flows horribly but at least the last line is legit IC.
M.A.D. (stop worrying)
No man looks his best when pulled straight out of the tropics. Operative 18's hair hung in sweat-set clumps around his face, and his skin was a discoloured mess of sunburn stripes and insect bites and patches of bronze. He was worn and tatty but his eyes were alive with stories - most of which, Ocelot knew from prior experience, would be untrue - and even with his tiny body slumped in a hard briefing room chair, his gestures seemed irritatingly lively and contented. O18 was an alleycat in a world of silent jungle hunters, a scavenger who still lived only because he was incredibly useful.
Kazuhira's coded transmission had been quite clear, but Ocelot's insatiable craving for detail had driven him to recall an infiltrator. Operative 18 had been hiding in MSF's medical corps - he had an aversion to killing, a forgiveable flaw in a spy who was otherwise brilliant, and he'd acquitted himself well within Big Boss's recycled army though the codename he'd used there was unprofessionally ironic. A psychological assessment had assured him that O18 was stable, but sometimes prone to attempts at self-destruction; feeling invincible, perhaps he almost wanted to get caught.
"Didn't they see you leave?" he asked, as if he wasn't accustomed to how O18 operated. He didn't like to remind his spies how much he knew about them, and he approached them as if he were their equal, a fellow agent and an ally, rather than anything more fundamental. He reasoned his life might be extended by this cultivation of ignorance. Why allow people to know how much power you had over them?
"They don't remember I was ever there." O18 sighed softly. Ocelot understood; it was a safer life than most spies led, but O18 had no prospect of ever forming friendships on a mission - or enmities, and Ocelot enjoyed and valued both of those things.
O18 had been found in some hellhole slum in Eastern Europe when he was a child, and the Soviet Branch had raised him in a psychic school they maintained in D.C. as a covert act of diplomacy and science that was sadly unregarded by all the city's Cold Warriors. He spoke English fluently in that clean tone that the unworldy liked to call 'accentless'. Most of his passports said he was American. He blessedly wasn't one of the mad all-powerful psychics who were as much a danger to themselves as to their targets as to their handlers; rather, he had a strong but limited knack with the mind's suggestible faculties. He could make people sincerely believe any lie he told (and his lies were both many and flagrant), and he was capable of making small deletions from other people's memories. Like erasing his own presence. Like being a perpetual stranger.
"The reports we've received say they have a nuke." O18 nodded. Ocelot hadn't expected him to refute Kazuhira's dispatch - there were enough of the damn things around that there had always been a real possibility that they wouldn't be able to stop Big Boss from acquiring one if he'd been determined upon it. It was only surprising that it had happened so soon. How was of secondary importance. They'd investigate whatever mistake had been made later. For now he could cut to more important questions; "Just one nuke?"
"Currently, yes."
"Are they trying to acquire more?"
O18 shook his head. "They don't have control of an enrichment facility, and couldn't build one on their ocean rig. They've no immediate plans to steal another, either."
"But they could?"
"That depends on the security of the rest of the world's nukes." True enough. Big Boss was getting older, and was clearly leaning ever more on the young blood of his private army, but it would be hard to build a facility that he and his followers couldn't infiltrate. Not all nuclear nations had the ability to do so.
Until that hypothetical problem pressed itself, there was but one more remaining. "And will they use it?"
"Well now. That's a good question." Ocelot knew it was. He'd asked it. He waited patiently for O18 to elaborate on his blather. "They're acting under essentially the same considerations as any other nuclear power, but they're not any other nuclear power. It's only one nuke. If they launch, they'll lose their deterrent, but if they don't allow themselves to launch, it was never a real deterrent to begin with. They need the world to see their fingers on the red button, or it's worthless and they'll be as fragile with it as they ever were without."
"Deterrence is the ultimate prisoners' dilemma."
"In which Outer Heaven can only play the final round, yes." O18 was, unaccountably, smiling about this.
Like all Patriots in good standing, Ocelot had implanted psychic defenses and was thus completely immune to O18's bullshit, and he expected to consistently hear an above average amount of truth from those filthy lips, but he wasn't above being confounded by the man. "So that's what you've got for our masters? Games and guesswork?"
"No - no. I've got to tell you that you're all looking at it from completely the wrong perspective." Ocelot stared at him. "You're trying to figure out how far Big Boss would ever go, as if his was the sole power that mattered here. What you need to do is look at it from the point of view of the warhead."
...Ah. "You're out of your mind," he said calmly.
"Try it and then tell me that again. If you were a warhead, what would you want?"
Ocelot was not inclined to descend into O18's derangement - but the idea slid over his mind and caught in those sanded grooves inside that knew what it was for a man to think like a weapon and found it far too easy to simulate the opposite. Ocelot was a revolver. He killed with power and precision, he recoiled and was reloaded; he knew every trick; he would age into living antiquity, never becoming any less deadly than what he was; and whatever emblems adorned his surface were irrelevant to what he was.
With that in mind, he anatomised the mentality of a warhead, his eyes on O18's rosy face. He began to see its inherent logic - but he wasn't going to feel it in the obsessive way O18 patently did. Men had their odd fixations. Ocelot was indulgent of his own love of torture; others got weak over money or possessions or guns or gambling, or, strangest of all from his perspective, women.
In the illuminated slant of O18's eyes, he thought he saw a wistful romance with nuclear arms.
The stupidity of it made him angry - stupid unnecessary games, when he knew Big Boss in every way that would ever matter, the details of his mind scratched out on Ocelot's own by ceaseless study and long hours of their rough substitutes for intimacy. Yes, John could still surprise him; he learned fast, and moved faster. But Ocelot didn't need heretic meditations to understand him and his army and he pitied anyone who thought they did.
He accused in exchange for false insight. "He's got to you, hasn't he? His damnfool nuclear exile ideogogy has got into your feeble mind and turned you."
"Not nearly as hard as he's got to you!" Ocelot scowled through his transparency, feeling blood rush to his face. He could, he reminded himself, have O18 killed for this uncharacteristic flirtation with the truth. "But really now - Outer Heaven won't be unchanged by nukes any more than America is. You have to consider how being prisoners of their one-piece game is going to affect them. Him. Them."
O18 shrugged, as if to say it was all very obvious just so long as you were as mad as he was, and Ocelot felt drawn to indulge his fanciful speculation - anything but wonder what they'd driven John to, how they'd pushed him so far away and so deep into the ocean. With a nuke. John has a nuke. "So what, in your view, does the nuke want?"
O18 stared at the walls of the chamber, speaking slowly as he toyed with his thoughts. "What everything wants - and needs - is to follow their life's purpose. Nukes weren't created for deterrence. They were created to win one war and start another." And that Cold War had given them all - Patriots, spies, nukes - the very breath they needed for life. "People obsess over voluntary disarmament, test-ban treaties and the like - but all that matters, if you're playing at game-theory essentials, is whether the world has one nuke or more than one. Two nukes means mutually assured destruction. Whether they're used or not, they only ever bring stalemate. But only one nuke, one nuke can be what it was designed to be. A weapon."
"A weapon no one wants to ever use." It was a cruel god that had given men both nuclear weapons and consciences, and a capricious god that had allowed a rogue power to have even one of them.
"Quite, not least because once used you no longer have it; what's the ghost of a deterrent worth? But there's the possibility, every day, that you might use it anyway. Even if you don't intend to, another nation might move their fingers, and that's the end of all of both of you. The nuke will always be a temptation to them - warheads might make a nation powerful, but never happy. It's not in their souls."
You're insane, he thought again. Ocelot could almost hear O18's fevered imagination ticking under his sunburned scalp. He must never send him south of the twenty-fourth parallel ever again, and should probably dispose of him before his mind finally snapped. But he was damnably useful. "Do you seriously believe that so many nations are desperately scrabbling for misery?"
O18 shrugged off the very idea of believing anything. "I do think that America believes it. It's policy, stated or otherwise. They miss that simple world with only three nukes that all belonged to them, and they'll preach nonproliferation and disarmament for everyone else until they're back at that position - a few nukes, maybe only one nuke, and it's all theirs. Or they'll start to fantasise shields that keep other nukes out - any dream that will let them have nukes without having to deal with deterrence. They'll be very safe and happy. Pity it'll never happen."
"Pity indeed." Ocelot mouthed the emotion. He couldn't feel it. If he felt anything right now, it was anger that he could only reach at what he wanted through others. Could only see and know and feel via proxies, erratic ones that ran on ghostspeak and which injected too many thoughts of their own. "MSF have brought a nuke to their heaven - I think we can assume they have abandoned the pursuit of happiness."
"Haven't we all? Warheads get to everything. Having one, keeping one, means ensuring that access to it is totally under your control. What would they do, to protect it from spies and trespassers? What wouldn't they do?" He paused for a moment. "They're at an advantage, in that they're already the kind of tightly controlled military state that nuclear arms require. They don't need to silently rip up their democracy like the USA did in the McCarthy years."
"So that's what nukes want? Victory and misery and absolute control?"
"Among many of their kind? They haven't a choice but to become all that. But only one nuke - especially if you don't truly want to use it - if it's not to be used, perhaps what one nuke most wants is to be forgotten. To play out its existence as a deterrent, a nuke must be used in mutually assured destruction - or set aside for good, and that means -" he jerked his thumb to the south with uncanny, or prerehearsed, dead reckoning - "exactly what they're doing so much of at Outer Heaven; research and development of conventional weaponry. The taboo of nuclear war demands that, especially with only one warhead. Being able to rely on their other defences is the best way for Outer Heaven to ensure they'll never have to waste it."
"So you're saying you think they'd only ever launch in a retaliatory strike?"
"That would be a tidy answer to your problem, wouldn't it? Then you could simply launch twice - or launch in such a way that they couldn't retaliate. No - I'm saying that their nuke is their last resort and they won't waste it." His eyes seemed to dance again with mad, misplaced stellar fission that might, if his fixation were targeted at something less inhuman, have indicated some soft affection, even love.
Ocelot narrowed his eyes, crushed those hints of emotion out of his mental calculation - which was that Operative 18 was possessed of a lunatic visionary spirit that wasn't completely without logic or worth, and his view could be sensibly interpreted as meaning that the Patriots, and their world, were safe from the MSF nuke so long as they took care not to present opportunities, or provocations, to use it. And that that was that, and there was no return from the brink of proliferation. Not even with one, only one, warhead. "I'll report your assessment of the situation to our superiors, then."
"Thank you." O18 drummed his knuckles on the table, clearly ready to move on to the next item on his mental docket. "So," he asked. "Your place or mine?"
no subject
(Anonymous) 2011-10-10 10:35 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
no subject
Apart from the odd scribble I've not done Ocelot POV before, so that is reassuring. There's been one very good Ocelot POV fic recently, and I am in awe of it although I've not finished reading it yet.