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.)
