In 1914 a secret council, the Philosophers, formed to steer world events through money and influence. Over fifty years their wealth gathered in a hidden fund, the Philosophers' Legacy. The Second World War produced the Boss and her Cobra Unit, the first modern special forces. The Cold War then split the Philosophers between East and West. In 1964 the Boss appeared to defect to the Soviet Union and was killed by her protégé Naked Snake at the end of Operation Snake Eater. Snake received the title Big Boss, and the Legacy passed to Major Zero. Nearly everything later called a Patriot idea traces back to what Zero did with that money.
Zero used the Legacy to found Cipher, the organisation that became the Patriots. Its founders were Zero, Big Boss, EVA, Ocelot, Para-Medic and Sigint, and its aim was a unified world held together by control of information, in the name of the Boss's last wish. In 1970 the FOX unit rebelled in Central America and Big Boss crushed it. Zero's methods then drove Big Boss out, and he founded the mercenary army Militaires Sans Frontières (MSF) with Kazuhira Miller. In 1972 Zero's scientists produced the Les Enfants Terribles, three clones of Big Boss named Solid, Liquid and Solidus, as an insurance policy and a weapon.
In 1974 MSF destroyed Hot Coldman's Peace Walker, an AI-controlled nuclear weapon, in Costa Rica, and showed that a private army could decide the outcome of a crisis. Its island headquarters, Mother Base, became the model for the PMC. In 1975 Cipher's covert unit XOF, under Skull Face, destroyed it, and Big Boss fell into a nine-year coma. Skull Face poisoned Zero, seized his unit and prepared a new weapon; the Vocal Cord Parasites. In 1984 the Diamond Dogs, a new army under the Big Boss name, destroyed XOF and killed Skull Face. Only a few parasites still remain. Zero's body stayed on life support while the Patriots' founders died off and a network of AIs took over their work.
In 1995 Big Boss founded Outer Heaven, a nation of soldiers in southern Africa, armed with a Metal Gear, a walking nuclear launch platform. The FOXHOUND rookie Solid Snake destroyed it and killed "Big Boss". Having survived, Big Boss rebuilt it in 1999 as Zanzibar Land in Central Asia, and Snake defeated him again. Both nations proved that a state built from soldiers could threaten the world, and both proved that even the mighty fall. The Big Boss legend grew in the silence that followed.
Three incidents in four years shaped the modern world. In 2005 FOXHOUND under Liquid Snake seized Shadow Moses in Alaska with Metal Gear REX, and Solid Snake stopped it with the FOXDIE virus he carried. REX's designer, Hal Emmerich (Otacon), left the arms industry and founded Philanthropy with Snake. In 2007 Metal Gear RAY was stolen from a marine tanker, which sank. In 2009 Solidus Snake seized the Big Shell, an offshore cleanup facility, and Raiden killed him aboard Arsenal Gear. The Patriots staged or exploited each of the three incidents, and very few people knew.
By the 2000s the Patriots' AIs ran the world's conflicts. The Sons of the Patriots (SOP) system placed nanomachines in every soldier to control weapon access, track vital signs, suppress fear and report to the AI. Every weapon was ID-locked and licensed. PMCs became the world's armies, and governments paid them to wage wars that never ended, because war had become the engine of the global economy. Arms dealers such as Drebin laundered weapons through the system. By 2014 war was a managed business. A soldier could not fire an unlicensed weapon or disobey the network.
In 2014 Liquid Ocelot, Ocelot carrying Liquid's arm and personality, seized the SOP system and the Patriots' AI core, intending to rule the war economy himself. Solid Snake, aging rapidly because of FOXDIE, set out to kill him, with Otacon, Sunny, Raiden, Meryl Silverburgh, Drebin and a coalition of allies. The mission crossed the Middle East, South America and Eastern Europe and ended aboard Outer Haven, Ocelot's fortress. A virus shut the AI network down. Ocelot died, and Big Boss and Zero died in a last meeting at the graves of the Boss and Big Boss. The SOP system went dark in a single night, nanomachines slipped their controls, weapon locks failed and the war economy lost its controller. Snake survived, with only months left, and Otacon took him away to care for him.
The two years after the Patriots' fall are called the Interregnum. Governments that had outsourced their armies could not afford to take them back, and the largest PMCs, left without a paymaster, hunted for clients. Nanomachine production leaked into back-alley fabs. Cybernetics, once a military monopoly, became a commercial trade with clinics and finance plans, and failed or discarded cyborgs gathered in the slums of port cities. Weapons without ID locks flooded the black market. New outfits grew: Maverick Security Consulting, founded by Boris Popov and drawing on former cyborg soldiers, and Desperado Enforcement LLC, an aggressive cyborg PMC. The World Marshal Corporation arose to enforce international norms for a fee. Philanthropy, now Otacon's small cell, began hunting the loose ends of the Patriots' systems. By autumn 2015 border towns teem with contractors and nobody knows who the enemy is meant to be.
In 2004 a consortium of Patriot-linked financiers bought a war-ruined breakaway territory on the Black Sea coast and organised it as the Colchis Special Economic and Humanitarian Territory. The Colchis Charter suspended national law, created a free port, banned any standing army and handed security to PMCs licensed by a Licensing Board. For ten years it served as a laboratory for the privatised war economy: the Tiers handled the arms trade, Palace Row housed contractor headquarters and the Chrome Quarter sold augmentation. The Harbor Spire was begun as the Zone's symbol and never finished. When the Patriots fell in 2014 the Charter's paymaster vanished. In 2015 the Board issues licences nobody enforces, Vanta Dynamics, Maverick, Desperado and the World Marshals compete for the Zone's contracts, and the smuggler clans and Rustbelt scrapwrights reassert themselves. The Charter's final term expires in the autumn of 2016.
The Patriots' last central AI, JD, was believed destroyed with the rest of the network in 2014. A fragment survived in a failsafe, a dormant server stack inside a derelict Outer Haven-class hull that ran aground in the Phasis delta during the collapse. The fragment holds the operational history of Big Boss and has built a working model of him. In 2015 Vanta Dynamics' Director Elias Thorne found it and began using it in a programme called Legend, which feeds its tactics into soldiers' augmentations. Soldiers who run the Imprint fight with uncanny skill and begin to lose their own memories. Thorne believes he controls it. The fragment is incomplete and wants to be whole. This is unknown to the public and to nearly everyone in the Zone, apart from Thorne, a few of his staff and Philanthropy, which is tracing the signal.
The public record is thin and partly false. The Boss is remembered as a traitor, and Big Boss as the greatest soldier of the century and a mercenary warlord who founded Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land, presumed dead after the latter.
The Patriots are known only as a conspiracy theory, and most people believe the war economy collapsed through a technical failure, a virus or a financial crash.
Solid Snake is a hero to some and a terrorist to others. Raiden, Otacon and Philanthropy are minor names. Nanomachines and cybernetics are widely known; the fact that they were ever centrally controlled is not.