The Shape of the Lie
There’s a feeling you get when the story starts to unravel.
Not suddenly, but in slow, splintering moments.
A line that doesn’t land right. An explanation that feels too clean. The gut-deep suspicion that you’ve been shown a stage instead of the truth.
And if you’ve served in the War on Terror, you know that feeling too well.
It wasn’t just that the mission kept changing. It was that the meaning kept changing.
We were told we were fighting for freedom. Then for security. Then for oil, sort of—but don’t say that out loud. Then for hearts and minds. Then, eventually, just to hold the ground we stood on.
The narrative bent with the wind.
And somewhere in the middle of it, a generation of us had to figure out who we were—inside a story we never wrote.
But the thing about stories is: they leave traces. Especially the ones built to control.
Between 1999 and 2003, a strange cluster of media emerged—games, comics, films—that saw the cracks before we did. They weren’t warning us about specific wars. They were warning us about narratives. About how easily identity can be rewritten. About how rebellion can be part of the script. About what happens when you tell the truth and the world shrugs.
This is an essay about those stories.
And about how they predicted—and reflected—the world we fought for, the world we returned to…
…and the world we’re still trying to make sense of.
IDENTITY DELETED — Metal Gear Solid 2 and the Anti-Hero’s Disintegration
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty arrived in the U.S. on November 13th, 2001—two months after the September 11th attacks. A few last-minute changes were made to the game’s ending: originally, Arsenal Gear, a massive flying fortress, was meant to crash directly into Lower Manhattan, toppling the Statue of Liberty along the way. In the final version, the cataclysm is implied offscreen. But the ghosts of those scenes linger, and the echoes are louder in hindsight. The scrapped material survives in early renders and script fragments on The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2.
Even without that final visual, the game remains terrifyingly accurate.
Not about terrorism.
About control.
About the way story can be used to shape a man.
And to erase him.
You play as Raiden—a surprise to players who expected Solid Snake, and a disappointment to many at the time. Raiden was delicate. Beautiful. Unsteady. And slowly, as the story unfolds, we learn that he’s not real. Not in the way we expect a protagonist to be. He has no true past, no secure memory, no agency. Everything about him—his mission, his identity, his purpose—is artificial.
He has been groomed, trained, and deployed in a virtual simulation meant to recreate a previous war. He is part of a project called the S3 Plan: “Selection for Societal Sanity.” Its goal? To shape human behavior. To ensure conformity. To eliminate chaos by dictating the flow of information—and through that, to dictate what a human being is allowed to be.
His suffering isn’t the point.
His compliance is.
Raiden’s entire experience—the mission, the orders, even the people around him—is a fiction. By the end of the game, he learns that what he believed was real was constructed by an artificial intelligence called GW, the digital heart of the S3 Plan.
“The S3 Plan does not stand for Solid Snake Simulation. What it really stands for is ‘Selection for Societal Sanity.'”
This isn’t just about testing Raiden. It’s about testing us.
Raiden is a narrative weapon. And the horror isn’t just that he’s been lied to. It’s that he’s designed to believe the lie—trained in fiction, deployed in simulation, unaware that his reality has been written for him.
And Metal Gear’s creator, Hideo Kojima didn’t just make this point in the game.
He made it in the marketing.
All the trailers, the TV spots, the magazine ads—every piece of promotional material was cut to convince players that MGS2 was a straightforward sequel to the original Metal Gear Solid. That you would be playing as Solid Snake again. That you’d be reenacting familiar heroics in familiar ways.
The game’s first hour even reinforces this: Snake on a covert mission, the music swelling, the rain, the sneaking, the voice… it’s all exactly what was promised.
Then Snake disappears.
And you’re left with Raiden.
And Kojima doesn’t tell you why.
He lets you sit in the lie.
He lets you feel the betrayal.
Just like Raiden does.
And in doing so, he turns the player into part of the experiment. The S3 Plan isn’t just Raiden’s world.
It’s yours.
You’ve been fed a narrative. You’ve been groomed to expect a certain kind of story. And when that story doesn’t arrive, you’re left not just confused—but angry.
Because that’s what the modern machine does to us. It sells us a version of heroism. Of righteousness. Of “normal.”
And when the curtain is pulled back, when the characters shift, when the story fails to resolve the way we were promised?
We feel cheated.
That’s not game design.
That’s psychological warfare.
And if you’ve served in the War on Terror?
You know that feeling better than most.
CHOICE AS THEATER — The Matrix and the Rebellion Script
The Matrix arrived in 1999, just before the century turned and the world as we knew it shifted beneath our feet. At first glance, it was a sleek, high-concept cyberpunk thriller—black leather, kung fu, techno-beats, and bullet time. But beneath the trench coats and sunglasses, it carried a more unsettling message:
The world you know is a lie. Reality is a prison. And control is maintained not through violence, but through narrative.
Where Metal Gear Solid 2 is about the horror of discovering you’ve been written into a script you never chose, The Matrix seduces us with the fantasy of choosing to step outside of the script.
Neo is offered a choice: the red pill or the blue. Truth or illusion. Freedom or control. The chance to Awaken.
But even that choice?
It’s part of the system.
The original Matrix ends with a bang. Neo sees the code. He flies. The system, once invincible, is now mortal. There’s a promise—not just of personal liberation, but of systemic collapse.
“I’m going to show them a world without you.”
Cue Marilyn Manson’s “Rock is Dead.” Cue black trench coats and ringing phones and righteous fury. It leaves you with the feeling that yeah—we’re gonna tear it all down, man.
And if you were a teenager in 1999, that ending burned.
If you were a soldier in 2003… it haunted.
Because you wanted that power. That clarity. That world-shattering truth.
You wanted to believe that seeing through the lie meant winning.
But then Reloaded arrived.
And it told us the truth.
“The One was never meant to end anything.”
Neo meets the Architect, and we learn the terrible reality: his rebellion was programmed. His victory expected. His purpose not to liberate—but to reset the system before it could destabilize.
He’s not The One.
He’s Version Six.
Hope, it turns out, was the software patch. Rebellion was the failsafe.
Looking back, we should have realized: we were living it.
Post-9/11, hope was weaponized. We were given flags and slogans and movies about heroism. We were told we were fighting evil, protecting home, defending freedom.
We were told we were changing the world.
But none of that was true.
The system never intended to end.
And neither did the war.
By the time Revolutions arrived in November 2003—just a month before I shipped out to Basic Training—the story seemed to collapse under its own weight. Neo doesn’t escape the system. He bargains with it. Sacrifices himself not to destroy the Matrix, but to preserve a truce. To pause the war.
It was, at the time, a confusing disappointment.
It didn’t feel like an ending.
It felt like giving up.
But after going to war… after seeing what systems really look like, how inertia and compromise and survival work in practice?
It made more sense than I wanted it to.
Neo doesn’t win.
He just finds a way to keep people alive.
The war ends not with liberation, but with a deal.
Not truth. Not revolution. Just… containment.
And that’s what the War on Terror became.
Not a righteous battle for freedom. Not the defense of civilization.
Just maintenance.
Drones overhead. Coffins wrapped in flags. Politicians promising change they had no intention of delivering. A low, endless hum of simulated peace built atop blood.
We weren’t soldiers of destiny.
We were reset functions.
RAGE AND THE RUINED MESSIAH — Spider Jerusalem, The Authority, and the Cost of Knowing
If Metal Gear Solid 2 showed us the script, and The Matrix taught us our rebellion was part of it, then Warren Ellis’ work—Transmetropolitan and The Authority—asks the ugliest question of all:
What if none of that mattered?
What if you still lost? What if you knew the truth, screamed it from the rooftops, and nothing changed?
Spider Jerusalem: Dying for the Truth
Transmetropolitan follows Spider Jerusalem, a journalist in a future that’s rotting under the weight of its own technology and power. He’s not a hero. He’s not even stable. He’s furious, high, unshaven, full of pills and righteous fire.
And he sees everything.
He calls out presidents. Exposes genocide. Shines light into every festering crack of society. And people listen. Sometimes. But not enough. Never enough.
He doesn’t fix anything.
He just documents the horror.
And it breaks him.
His body gives out—slowly at first. Then violently. He begins to forget names. He bleeds. He shakes. He can barely stand. The truth is killing him. And he keeps writing anyway.
Because he has no other choice.
“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.”
But the world doesn’t fall. It limps. Keeps shambling forward. Because Spider’s not just up against corruption.
He’s up against contempt.
Against a system that doesn’t just lie—it despises you for asking questions.
The two presidents Spider battles embody that decay.
The Beast, the incumbent, hides his cruelty behind a heavy mask of competence and belief:
“I’m still going to be president next month, you know why? Because I know what a Real America means. And I’ve got the guts to keep it afloat. Because I can do the job. Because I believe in it. And Callahan doesn’t believe in shit.”
But Callahan, his successor, doesn’t even pretend:
“I hate you all, you know? All you scum. I want to be president, because I hate you. I want to fuck with you. I want you to shut up and do things properly. Get through your doomed little lives quietly. I want to be president, because I think I should be.”
That line isn’t metaphor.
It’s confession.
He tells Spider to his face that he wants power for the sheer pleasure of domination.
And he wins.
Because the public is too exhausted. Too numb. Too buried under broken systems and poisoned discourse to muster what resistance should be.
Because outrage becomes spectacle, and truth becomes noise.
Because Spider aims right, fires his one bullet…
…and the world shrugs.
The Authority: Power Without Permission
Before The Authority arrived on shelves in 1999, Warren Ellis was already laying the groundwork in Stormwatch, a series about a United Nations-backed superhero team charged with global peacekeeping. And for a while, that was enough.
But it wasn’t heroic.
It was bureaucratic.
The team was overseen by Henry Bendix, the “Weatherman”—a cold tactician who believed in results, not morals. He saw freedom as a flaw. Compassion as weakness. Bendix didn’t want justice. He wanted order.
“All this touchy-feely crap of theirs… love doesn’t work. Freedom doesn’t work. All we use freedom for is to kill each other. I’ll change the world. No one will die, unless I decide they die. I’ll change the world, one body at a time, if I have to, until people start controlling themselves. Control is the key. Not ‘freedom’. There must be discipline.”
It was fascism with a clipboard. The kind that justifies atrocities because “somebody has to make the hard calls.”
Sound familiar?
And for a while, it worked.
Until Jenny Sparks—cigarette in mouth, lightning in hand—saw through it and tore it all down.
After Bendix, Jackson King steps in. A man of principle. A man who wants to do good, but who’s still bound by the very system he inherited.
And when a world is threatened—not his world, but a parallel one—he flinches.
“It’s too big. We don’t have the authority.”
It’s a stunning admission: we see the crisis, we know what’s right… but we lack the mandate to act.
Winter, the team’s moral spine, doesn’t let it go.
“We don’t have the right to save them? If that’s true, then we also don’t have the right to exist.”
That’s not just a line.
That’s a verdict.
It declares: if we’re only willing to use our power when it’s safe, sanctioned, or politically convenient—then we are complicit in every tragedy we allow to happen.
That moment cracks the world in half.
And from the fissure comes The Authority.
Jenny Sparks forms a new team. No more oversight. No more excuses. No more permission.
They act.
They save refugees from warlords by incinerating the warlords. They stop superhuman fascists by killing them in the streets. They fly in like gods and change the world in real time.
“We are The Authority. Behave.”
It’s thrilling. Terrifying. And for a while, it works.
But power isn’t static.
And righteousness has a half-life.
The Authority start making decisions for people. They intervene before being asked. They topple regimes and replace them with what they believe is better.
And slowly, they stop being defenders.
They become rulers.
And here’s the trick: they still think they’re the good guys.
This should ring like a gunshot to any American veteran of the War on Terror.
Because we did the same damn thing.
We went into Afghanistan and Iraq with “liberation” in our mouths. We kicked in doors, toppled governments, rewrote constitutions. We called it “nation building.”
And when it didn’t work?
We doubled down.
Because by then, it wasn’t about justice.
It was about maintaining control.
The same arc Ellis traced—Bendix to Sparks, from Authority to authoritarianism—is the arc of American foreign policy from 2001 to 2025.
We wanted to be Jackson King: reluctant heroes, doing our best with what we had.
But we acted like Jenny Sparks: impatient, self-righteous, violent.
And we risked becoming Bendix: calculating monsters convinced that control was the only way to keep the world from tearing itself apart.
The Authority doesn’t end in triumph.
It ends in fracture. In failure. In replacement.
Because unchecked power doesn’t redeem itself.
It just eats itself alive.
In the wake of Stormwatch and The Authority, we are left with a bitter truth:
The problem isn’t just power.
The problem is meaning.
Spider Jerusalem told the truth and was ignored. The Authority used power and became what they claimed to fight. Neo was chosen to rebel, and it was part of the code. Raiden was shaped from birth by data, memes, simulation—his whole identity forged by design.
And all of them realized, sooner or later:
There is no bedrock.
No moral center. No fixed reality. No objective meaning to fight for.
Only stories.
And stories can be written by anyone.
If you’re not the one writing the narrative, you’re living inside someone else’s design. A government. A machine. An algorithm. An administration that calls itself “freedom.” An enemy who insists they’re your savior. A campaign ad. A tweet. A hashtag.
And if that’s true—if everything we believe is a construct—then who controls the constructors?
That’s where we’re going now.
To the collapse of meaning. To information warfare. To the space where ideology, media, and identity are weaponized so precisely… you never even realize you’ve been hit.
Welcome to the war that came after the war.
The war for the story itself.
The War on Meaning.
Static in the Head
For many of us, the war never really ended.
Not because of bombs or bullets—but because the story never stopped.
It rewrote itself every time we blinked.
One day, we were liberators. The next, occupiers. Saviors, then enforcers. Fighting for justice. Then oil. Then something about hearts and minds.
We watched our roles mutate in real time—refracted through press briefings, pundits, algorithms, mission statements.
Some of us tried to hold on. Some of us took control.
We became The Authority.
Decisive. Unflinching. Certain.
And like them, we didn’t notice when confidence turned to control. When action became imposition. When belief became brutality.
We thought we could be better. Smarter. Stronger. We thought doing the right thing was enough.
But power doesn’t grant clarity. It just makes you louder.
And when the volume reaches a certain level, it doesn’t matter what you’re saying.
All anyone hears is noise.
Reclaiming the Pen
There’s a quiet moment in Metal Gear Solid 2—just before the end—where Snake passes on to Raiden, what he was told at the conclusion of the original Metal Gear Solid:
“We’re not tools of the government, or anyone else. Fighting is all I was ever good at, but at least I always fought for what I believed in.”
That might be the most radical thing said in the whole damn game.
Because it’s not just that we were written into someone else’s story.
It’s that we forgot we could write our own.
The Authority forgot. So did Raiden. So did Neo. So did Spider, in the end.
Because story isn’t just a weapon.
It’s memory. It’s identity. It’s how we decide what is real.
And if the last 25 years have shown us anything, it’s how easily that power can be hijacked.
If story can be used to dominate, dehumanize, pacify, and profit—then it can also be used to rebuild.
To remember. To resist. To begin again.
In my experience, the loudest, most ardent anti-war activists I’ve ever known are all combat veterans. We’ve seen Hell. We don’t want anyone else to ever have to.
We know what lies look like.
We know what silence buys.
And if we’ve carried anything home from the smoke and static of the last two decades, maybe it’s this:
We’re not just survivors.
We’re storytellers.
And it’s time we picked up the pen.
Part 2 of this essay, Restored Meaning, arrives in a few days. This was the disarmament. What comes next is the stand.