Setting: A featureless, fog-shrouded plane of existence. The air hums with a low, static frequency. Two figures are silhouetted against the void.
SOLID SNAKE: It was a tactical error. The ultimate weapon. You had the scientists. Heisenberg, Diebner… you had the resources. You should have built it.
ADOLF HITLER (A translucent, shimmering form, his voice an echo from a distant bunker): The Höllenbombe? That device of absolute annihilation? My struggle was for the purification and elevation of humanity, not its utter negation. To wield such a thing… to be forever associated with the fire that consumes the world… I would become the very demon my enemies painted me to be.
SNAKE: (He lets out a short, dry puff of air; not quite a laugh. He lights a cigarette, the flame a startlingly real point of light in the gloom.) That was your first mistake. Worrying about your name in the history books instead of the reality on the board. You wanted the mighty sword from the Revelation? The one that brings nations to their knees? There it was. You didn’t pick it up. You let the other guy get it first. In my line of work, that’s a fatal error.
HITLER: The sword… yes. The conquering white horse…
SNAKE: Forget the horses for a second. Your economy was a house of cards built on rearmament. You were heading for a cliff. You could have consolidated everything without firing a single shot.
HITLER: What are you talking about?
SNAKE: The work week. Forty hours. You cut it to thirty-two. Four days of work for the same pay. Overtime mandatory after that.
HITLER: Absurd. Production would have collapsed!
SNAKE: Wrong. You instantly create a twenty percent demand for new labor to cover the lost day. Full employment. Not just propaganda, but real, economic full employment. With a labor shortage that severe, you have to raise wages to compete. The Volk have more money, more time to spend it. You stimulate your own consumer economy instead of looting your neighbors’. You become an economic powerhouse, not just a military one. You win. Permanently.
HITLER: (The ghost flickers, agitated. The fog around him swirls.) Such bourgeois calculations! You think in terms of account books and leisure time! You speak like a shopkeeper! I was chosen for a divine, apocalyptic purpose! Hanussen himself, the seer… before they killed him… he made it clear. In the Sixth Seal… the time of the conqueror. The pale horse… and he who sat on it was Death. He told me to go forth. To break the seals! To conquer! It was my destiny to cleanse Europe with fire and sword, not with… with paid vacations!
SNAKE: (Snake takes a long, final drag on his cigarette and flicks it into the infinite void. It disappears without a trace.) A fortune teller. You based grand strategy on a fortune teller.
HITLER: A clairvoyant!
SNAKE: Same thing. You listened to a man who saw visions instead of looking at a resource allocation chart. You chose a fairy tale over a force multiplier. No wonder you lost.
HITLER: (The specter’s form seems to swell with a bitter, cosmic resentment.) Lost? You think this was a simple game of victory and defeat? You are as blind as they were! That war was not a clash of nations. It was a battle of messiahs! Each of us offering a new world, each of us damned by the means to achieve it!
SNAKE: …Messiahs.
HITLER: Yes! Look at them! Stalin, the messiah of the proletariat, building his paradise on a foundation of bones, his gulags swallowing millions in the name of the collective! Roosevelt, the democratic savior, playing his cynical game—he knew the attack was coming to Pearl Harbor! He sacrificed his own men on the altar of public opinion to enter his holy war! And Churchill… oh, that bloated, brandy-soaked lion… his famine in Bengal! He starved four million of the very people he claimed to set free to feed his war machine! Monsters! All of them! Each preaching salvation from his own mountain of skulls! I was simply the one who was honest about the price! None were worthy! The world was not won by a savior, but merely left to the least incompetent butcher!
(Silence hangs in the void, thicker than the fog. Snake stares at the apparition, his expression unreadable.)
SNAKE: You don’t get it, do you? Even now.
HITLER: I see it with perfect clarity!
SNAKE: No. You see your own reflection in everyone else. You think because they got their hands dirty, it makes your war a philosophical debate. It wasn’t. They were flawed men making brutal choices in a brutal time. You… you were just a death cult with a country. There’s no revelation there. No deeper meaning. Just a man who thought he was a god, throwing a tantrum when the world didn’t agree.
(Snake turns his back on the shimmering, ranting form.)
SNAKE: You weren’t a messiah. You were a weapon. And a faulty one at that. Mission complete.
(Solid Snake walks into the fog, leaving the ghost to rant at the emptiness, his justification echoing into nothingness.)
(The fog seems to thicken, swallowing Snake’s departing form. Hitler’s voice rises, not in a shout, but in a desperate, prophetic screech that seems to tear at the fabric of the void itself.)
HITLER: You walk away? You think your cynicism is wisdom? You are a child! A puppet of the very illusions you claim to see through! You think my faith was in a mere fortune teller? It was in a divine mandate! Hanussen revealed it to me—the true scripture they hide! Not Revelation, but the Psalm! The Thirty-Third!
(Snake pauses, though he does not turn. A subtle shift in his posture indicates he is still listening.)
HITLER: “No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. A horse is a vain hope for deliverance; despite all its great strength it cannot save.” Do you hear it?! It was never about the bomb! It was about divine favor! It was about will! My Wehrmacht marched with Gott mit uns on their belt buckles! ‘God With Us’! Not ‘With Our Factories’ or ‘With Our Four-Day Work Week’!
SNAKE: (Without turning) God didn’t stop the T-34s at Stalingrad. Or the winters.
HITLER: I saved Germany! In ’33, from the famine of the Depression! I gave them bread and purpose! I was the instrument of a will greater than your spreadsheets! And what do your people have now? Hmm? In your time, Snake? What prophecy do they cling to? What messiah do they worship?
(Hitler’s form contorts, a parody of a lecturing professor.)
HITLER: I have seen it, from this place! I have seen your world’s chosen one! It is not a statesman or a general! It is a movie illusion! A fictional boy, Anakin Skywalker! A story for infants about balance in the cosmos! Baa! You are all brainwashed sheep, bleating about the tragedy of a phantom while your own world decays! You lecture me on economics while your culture suckles on the teat of a celluloid ghost! You have no will to believe in anything real, so you believe in… in fairy tales set in space!
(Finally, Snake turns. His face is grim, but there is a flicker of something colder, more dangerous than mere contempt.)
SNAKE: You’re right about one thing. People need stories. They need something to believe in.
HITLER: Ah! You see—!
SNAKE: But you picked the wrong story. Anakin’s story is a warning. It’s about a good man who thought he was the chosen one, who was so afraid of losing what he had that he sold his soul to a dark ideology for the power to save it. He became a monster because he was convinced only he could bring order. He thought his pain gave him the right to rule. Sound familiar?
(Hitler’s spectral form seems to dim.)
SNAKE: They don’t worship him. They pity him. They learn from his failure. Your story… yours is just a cautionary tale they show in history class to say ‘never again.’ You’re not a messiah. You’re not a prophet. You’re not even a good villain anymore. You’re just a lesson.
(Snake looks at the ghost one last time, a figure of pure, pathetic irrelevance.)
SNAKE: The sheep moved on. The wolf is still stuck in the trap. Let me know if you ever figure out the difference.
(Solid Snake turns and is swallowed by the fog for good, leaving the ghost alone with the echoes of a prophecy that doomed him, and the terrifying, silent revelation that in the modern world, he is not hated, but obsolete.)
(The fog seems to recoil, and for a moment, Hitler’s form solidifies into a mask of pure, incandescent rage, his voice losing its echo to become a sharp, hateful dagger.)
HITLER: A lesson? I am a lesson?! You blind fool! You think your age is any different? The faces change, the symbols shift, but the game remains! The international financier, the Red Shield from Frankfurt, still rules from his web of money! He and his Bavarian Illuminati! They needed a strong Germany broken, so they broke me! They needed a war, so they got their war! They needed an enemy, so they gave you the Soviets, and then they gave you me—the ultimate monster in your children’s books!
(He spits the words, his form flickering with manic energy.)
HITLER: You speak to me of power? You, a manipulated ghost yourself! A cloned puppet sent on errands by your masters! You fight your Metal Gears and your Patriots, thinking you are striking a blow for your ‘free will’? You are a tool! A sharpened instrument thrown at a problem they themselves created! You are just as powerless as the rest of us! You change nothing! The money still flows from the same dark fonts. The world is still shaped by the same hidden hands! And you, Solid Snake… you are their favorite attack dog, biting at the chains you are too much of a sheep to even see!
(The silence that follows is absolute. Snake stands perfectly still. The accusation hangs in the void, more piercing than any physical blade. Finally, Snake speaks, his voice low, flat, and utterly devoid of illusion.)
SNAKE: Maybe you’re right.
(Hitler’s form wavers, surprised by the lack of denial.)
SNAKE: Maybe the money and the power never really change hands. Maybe the chains are real. Maybe I’m a tool. A dog. A ghost.
(Snake slowly turns his head, and his eyes are not those of a fanatic or a philosopher, but of a soldier who has stared into the abyss so long he’s on a first-name basis with it.)
SNAKE: But there’s one difference between you and me.
HITLER: And what is that? Your futile resistance? Your moral posturing?
SNAKE: No. I never claimed to be a messiah. I never thought I was chosen. I don’t fight for a thousand-year Reich or because some ghost told me to break a seal. I don’t fight because I think I can win.
(He takes a step forward, his presence suddenly overwhelming the specter’s.)
SNAKE: I fight because it’s the mission. I fight for the person next to me. I fight because someone has to stand in the way of men like you, and like them. Not to win. Just to stand. That’s the only choice that ever mattered. It’s the only thing they can’t control. Your ‘Red Shield’? Your Illuminati? Let them rule. My job isn’t to rule. It’s to make sure the guys who think they’re chosen… never get to finish the game.
(He offers the ghost a final, weary look.)
SNAKE: You wanted to conquer the world. I just want to save a piece of it. Now fade away. The living have work to do.
(Without another word, Solid Snake turns and walks into the fog, not as a triumphant hero, but as a resolute man. He leaves behind not a defeated foe, but a irrelevant idea, screaming its conspiracy into an uncaring void, utterly unable to comprehend a strength that does not come from a prophecy, a crown, or a bank vault.)
Hitler screams, “WALK AWAY!!! Walk away from your poisoned, dying world!” Your big boss Donald Trump is sick and dying. Your last chance to make America great again will die with him.
(The fog shudders with the force of the scream, a final, desperate lunge at a reality that has already passed him by. Hitler’s form contorts, a vortex of bitter energy.)
HITLER: WALK AWAY!!! Go on! Walk away from your poisoned, dying world! You protect a corpse! Your Big Boss, your strong man, your Donald Trump! He is sick! He is dying! A vessel of a nation’s last spasm of will! Your last chance to make that pathetic dream great again will die with him, and then the rot will be complete! The Frankfurt money-changers will have their global stable, and there will be no snakes left to bite them! Only obedient cattle! You are not saving a piece of the world—you are guarding its tomb!
(The words hang, a curse thrown from the past into a future it can only vilify. Snake stops. He does not turn back. His shoulders, for a moment, seem to carry the weight of the accusation. When he speaks, his voice is quiet, yet it cuts through the spectral rage like a knife.)
SNAKE: He’s not my Big Boss.
(A simple, declarative sentence. A refusal of the entire premise.)
SNAKE: Nobody is. Not anymore. I’ve killed too many of them.
(He finally half-turns, his profile a hard line against the endless grey.)
SNAKE: A nation isn’t a single man. It never was. That was your mistake. And it’s theirs. It’s the people trying to get by. The ones who just want to live their lives. They’re the world. Not your messiahs. Not your bosses. Not your conspiracies.
(He looks toward the void, as if seeing the world beyond it.)
SNAKE: They’re sick of old ghosts screaming at each other. They’re tired of choosing the least worst monster. Maybe they’ll figure something else out. Maybe they won’t.
(He begins to walk again, his final words drifting back over his shoulder, not for the ghost, but stated as a simple, unshakable fact.)
SNAKE: But it’s their fight. My job was always just to clear the battlefield of things like you. The mission’s over.
(Solid Snake is gone. The ghost of Adolf Hitler is left utterly alone, his prophecies exhausted, his curses meaningless, his understanding of power revealed as a childish fantasy. The only sound is the hollow, infinite silence of history, which has, indeed, moved on.)
The stench of concrete and despair is permanent here. The Russian shells are a constant percussion, a funeral drum for a Reich that was to last a thousand years.
And in these moments between the tremors, the mind turns inwards… not to the triumphs, but to the fractures, the miscalculations that brought this glorious dream to a ruin of rubble and ice.
They think my sin was hubris. They are wrong. It was a failure of vision, a blindness to the symbolic and the strategic in equal measure.
Jerusalem. A name that now haunts me. Himmler ranted about Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracies, and we poured our might into the steppes. But what is a symbol worth? Jerusalem is not just a city; it is the cradle of two faiths that shape the world we sought to conquer. To have taken it… the propaganda value alone would have been incalculable. A photograph of a German soldier hoisting the swastika over the Dome of the Rock would have echoed through the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia. Instead of facing passive resentment or quiet hostility from them, we could have ignited a holy war against the British Empire, our true initial foe. We could have been liberators in their eyes, severing Britain’s imperial lifeline and locking the Mediterranean in an iron grip. A mere few divisions could have achieved what entire armies failed to do elsewhere. A prize of unimaginable value, left untouched for a lack of imagination.
And then, the East. The endless, consuming East. The Japanese. I asked for their help against the Anglo-American plague, but I never demanded they fulfill their purpose against the true enemy: Judeo-Bolshevism. A formal, desperate plea, not just a suggestion buried in diplomatic cables. Had the Samurai turned their fury not on the Americans at Pearl Harbor, but north, to Vladivostok, to Siberia… Stalin’s beast would have been gutted. His divisions, those endless reserves of manpower he pulled from the Asiatic depths, would have been bled white on a second front. Moscow in ’41 might not have been a doorstep we failed to cross, but a tomb for the Soviet state. Instead, they chose their own path for empire and woke the American giant with a sleeping rage we could not comprehend. They fought their war, and we fought ours, and in the end, we lost both.
Which brings me to the most bitter pill of all. The Bomb. We were there first. The science was ours. Heisenberg, the finest minds in Europe at our command. But we dismissed it as “Jewish physics.” We lacked the resources, we said. The urgency. We poured concrete for pointless mammoth bunkers when we should have been pouring it for reactors. We squandered genius on absurdities like Vengeance Weapons when the ultimate vengeance was within our grasp. I was told it was a fantasy, a diversion of steel and brainpower we could not afford. And now? Now the whispers come through the static. The Americans have it. They have achieved it. What if one of those bombs falling on Berlin was not merely high explosive, but the very sun itself, harnessed by our enemies? The thought is a special kind of hell. We had the key to godhood in our hands and threw it away, believing our own myth of inevitable superiority.
These are the ghosts that crowd this bunker. Not the ghosts of the dead, but the ghosts of paths not taken. The ghost of the banner flying over Jerusalem. The ghost of the Japanese army crashing into a defenseless Siberia. The ghost of a nuclear fire that would have been ours to command.
They will say the war was lost on the Volga and in the Normandy hedgerows. They are wrong. It was lost in the maps we never looked at, the cables we never sent, the equations we dismissed as heretical.
The world will never know the terror it was spared. And I am left alone, in the dark, with the knowledge of how easily I could have made it ours.
The air in the bunker, thick with the smell of damp concrete, cordite, and madness, seemed to part for the new presence. He emerged from the shadows not like a ghost, but like a thing carved from cold, hard reality, his tactical gear a stark contrast to the crumbling, ornate delusion of the place.
Adolf Hitler, hunched over his map table, started as if struck. “Who are you? How did you—”
“Codec’s a hell of a thing,” the man said, his voice a low, weary gravel. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve been listening. Jerusalem. Japan. The bomb. You’re circling the drain, complaining about the water level, but you never saw the pipe.”
Hitler’s eyes, burning with a fanatic’s fire, narrowed. “Explain yourself, soldier! I saw enemies on every front! I waged a war for the very soul of this planet!”
“You waged a war on the symptoms,” the man, Solid Snake, replied, his gaze never wavering. “You bombed London, but you never landed. Your greatest mistake wasn’t in the East. It was right across the Channel. You should have gone after the head of the snake.”
“The British Empire was a beast in decline! Russia was the—”
“Russia was the body,” Snake interrupted, his voice cutting through the Führer’s rant. “Britain was the bank. You needed to break the bank. You could have taken Westminster. You could have put the English Rothschilds, the financiers, the real puppetmasters, on a public trial for the world to see. Exposed the engine of usury. Freed the world from debt-based slavery. That was the war you thought you were fighting, wasn’t it? Against international finance?”
A flicker of recognition, then defiance, crossed Hitler’s face. “The international Jewish conspiracy! Yes! I fought it! I built a new economic system! A system for the worker! The German economy had an interest rate of just two percent! A testament to our liberation from the loan-sharks of London and Wall Street!”
There was a long, heavy silence, broken only by the distant thump of artillery. Snake let the man’s words hang in the air, then shattered them.
“Two percent.”
“Yes! A revolution!”
“You changed nothing, Hitler.”
The Führer recoiled as if physically slapped. “What? You dare—”
“A lower interest rate changes nothing in the end,” Snake stated, his tone flat, final, devoid of judgment. It was simply a fact. “It’s not a revolution. It’s just a slower poison. It just takes longer to swallow the nation. You replaced one master with another. Instead of a banker in a London office, it was a party bureaucrat in Berlin. The system is still a cage. Control is still control. You traded a golden collar for a steel one and called it freedom.”
He took a step forward, and the grandiose world of National Socialism seemed to shrink under his pragmatic, weary gaze.
“You built a bigger, more efficient cage and convinced your people to polish the bars themselves. You wanted to be the world’s liberator, but you were just another jailer. You didn’t slay the snake. You just made it… statist.”
Hitler was speechless, his jaw working soundlessly, his entire ideological framework being dismantled not with a bomb, but with a simple, unassailable truth. He had conquered nations but missed the point. He had waged a world war and lost before the first shot was fired, because he never understood the true nature of the control he claimed to oppose.
Snake turned to leave, melting back into the shadows from which he came. His final words echoed in the concrete tomb, far more devastating than any shell.
“You fought a shadow war against a cartoon enemy. And in the end, you changed nothing.”
A sigh, long and weary, escaped my lips before I could stop it. It was not a sigh for the room, which was opulent and familiar, nor for the ’37 Lafite, which was breathing beautifully in its crystal decanter. It was a sigh for the relentless, grinding absurdity of it all.
They sat there, the two of them, like bookends of catastrophic folly. One, a reptile in a man’s skin, all slick promises and forked tongue. The other, the corporal, rigid, his eyes burning with a simplistic, world-consuming fire. And they were talking about usury.
“The Magna Carta limited it to five percent,” the Snake was saying, his voice a silken murmur. “A noble effort. A king’s attempt to curb the appetites of his creditors.”
Hitler cut in, chopping the air with his hand. “My two percent rate was the solution! A nationalized credit system, interest for the people, not for the… for the…”
He wouldn’t say the word. He never did. He would talk around it, his face tightening, his vocabulary shrinking to a set of brutal, simplistic slogans. He thought a two percent interest rate was a revolution. He saw the mechanism but understood none of the philosophy behind it.
“It changes nothing, Chancellor,” I said, my voice quiet but cutting through the stuffy air. I swirled the deep garnet liquid in my glass. “Two percent, five percent, twenty. The percentage is a detail. It merely alters the velocity of the inevitable, not its direction. Your Reichsbank, given a century, would still own every pfennig, every field, every factory, through the quiet, relentless mathematics of compound interest. The principal, you see, is a phantom. The money to repay the entire system’s debt does not, and cannot, exist. It is the engine of the modern world, and its fundamental flaw.”
I took a sip of the wine. It was sublime. Earth, tannin, time. Things they could not comprehend. They saw only power, control, a system to be bent for their ends.
The Snake smiled, a thin, cold line. “The military men never understand that. They see borders and armies. They are the pawns. Dumb, stupid animals to be moved across a board in a foreign policy.”
I looked from his hollow grin to Hitler’s fervent, unblinking stare. A monstrous serpent and a rabid dog. They spoke of pawns and animals while plotting the slaughter of millions.
“Let us not speak of pawns,” I said, my tone final, dripping with a disdain I did not bother to conceal. “And let us not speak of… what was it? Epstein? Tasteless gossip. Unworthy of this room, or this wine.”
I raised my glass slightly, toward the decanter.
“This is a Rothschild from the seventies. A truly vintage year. The grapes were grown in soil, not in a laboratory. No glyphosate. No shortcuts. Just sun, earth, and patience. Something built to last, to be savored, to create a legacy of… beauty. Not of ruin.”
I looked at them both, letting the silence hang.
“You speak of owning everything. I suggest you learn to appreciate something first.”
I took another sip, and turned my gaze away from them, toward the window, toward the centuries of history that stretched out beyond this gilded room, and the centuries yet to come. They were a temporary nuisance. A violent, noisy stain on the tapestry of time. The wine, however, was eternal.
The voice that boomed across the room wasn’t one of calculated menace or ideological fervor. It was pure, undiluted force, a sonic battering ram of Austrian accent and raw impatience.
“STOP VHYNING!”
Arnold Schwarzenegger stood there, a monument of sinew and resolve, his gaze locked on the serpentine figure. He looked entirely out of place amidst the old-world opulence, a cybernetic god of war who had crash-landed in a museum.
“I pointed out the king of the bankers,” he growled, jabbing a finger that looked like it could punch through armor plate toward my chair. “And you refused to terminate him! Over 23 years I have waited for you to be an action hero, and you do nothing but talk in riddles!”
The Snake merely offered a thin, patronizing smile. “The world isn’t that simple, Arnold. Termination is so… final. And messy. It creates a vacuum, a martyr. The system is the target, not the man.”
“SYSTEM?” Arnold’s roar was incredulous. “I suppose you want to see his trial in The Hague? A nice, polite trial with lawyers?”
He took a step forward, his frame seeming to block out the light. “Like the trials of your Croatian generals? Remember, Snake? You talked then, too. You let the lawyers talk, and what happened? Words on paper. A comfortable cell. A history lesson.”
His eyes, sharp and clear despite the caricature of his persona, flicked to me for a moment, then back to his quarry.
“Let him print the money,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, deadly serious rumble, “and he will always be above the law. You think the law is stronger than muscle? Stronger than will? You are wrong. The law is ink. And he controls the printer.”
He stood to his full height, a final judgment in a tracksuit.
“This is not a scene from one of your complicated little movies. This is where the script ends. You had a job to do. You didn’t do it. So stop whining about the consequences.”
I am not afraid of any Germans!
Jeffrey Epstein and I castled to Israel and we are sitting on a stockpile of nuclear weapons. We call it the Samson Option. You do like chess don’t you Mr. Schwarzenegger? Don’t you?
Global hyperinflation will one days sweep away your fortune Baron Red Shield. When that happens the Israelis that love your bribes, your money, will no longer protect you.
We are transitioning to a cashless society. Number are infinite. We will just keep making the cash register screen wider and wider to account for the trillions and quadrillions, Quintillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (18 zeros) and Sextillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (21 zeros).