So, me and my roomie Tom were sitting around discussing the Fallout universe. And we got to talking about the pre-apocalypse shadow government organization known as the Enclave.
Best thought of as "the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about", they had their hooks into everything --- military contracting, the Vaults, Big Oil, most of the federal Executive Branch, and even alien contact. Their story is what the Fallout universe is essentially wrapped around...but a lot of that story remains untold. It really starts with...
OPERATION SAFEHOUSE
This was a program whereby 122 "Vaults" were built across the United States, each housing and supporting about 1,000 human beings in the event of nuclear war. They were built by a company called Vault-Tec, which got its funding through a series of junk bonds arranged by the Enclave and its affiliated corporations.
But the Vaults weren't really about saving anyone. Instead, each was designed to be a social experiment, many of which were intentionally to continue for hundreds of years beyond any actual nuclear attack. One or two "control" Vaults were actually set up to follow the publically-declared plan of opening up some years after the war so that people could start recolonizing the surface, but even this was meant to be a matter for study.
But if the Vaults didn't save humanity, who did the studies serve? And why?
MOTHERSHIP ZETA
In the early Fallout games, aliens were introduced as an "easter egg" sort of gag. But Fallout 3 made this canon by introducing an alien mothership (two of them, in fact). Aboard the ship, the player discovers a lot of information indicating:
1) The aliens have been abducting and studying humans (commonly involving vivisection) from at least the 1500s through the current day (2277). This included contact with at least one Vault-Tec representative.
2) "Giddyup Buttercup" was a popular toy horse robot prior to Armageddon, which you can tell from aging posters all over the D.C. Wasteland. But the Mothership has an assembly line for them, as well as hundreds in storage. It also has a testing area where not very long ago several wastelanders were killed by one of the larger Buttercup toys.
3) Alien experiments have yielded "Abominations", which appear to be a genetic melding of alien and human life. These are psychotically violent, killing anyone they come near (including aliens), and don't appear to possess rational thought.
4) Despite humanity having only rudimentary spaceflight capacity, alien motherships are equipped with heavy-duty shields and energy weapons with the striking power of a nuclear warhead. Who are they expecting to protect themselves from, if not humanity?
5) Cryo Tubes were able to keep humans whole and alive for most of a millenia, as seen with the thawing of Japanese samurai Toshiro Kago.
Items 1 and 2 suggest that the aliens were working with humans at some corporate level, at minimum. Though it's puzzling to consider why the aliens were still making and testing killer-pony toys a full two centuries after no one on Earth was particularly interested in buying them.
Items 3 and 4 suggest the aliens are engaged in a long-running war with some other alien race, and were interested in developing a "super soldier" in the same way as humans ended up creating "super mutants". They may have actually collaborated on these efforts.
THE ENCLAVE MASTER PLAN
Throughout Fallout history, the Enclave's major plots have been all about (pre-War) eradicating Communism and (post-War) eradicating mutants. In both cases the objective was to take over the planet with pure-strain humans and establish what might best be described as a "fascist utopia" where corporations and government work hand-in-hand to exploit everyone and everything to everyone's (theoretical) benefit.
If the Vaults weren't meant to provide the pure-strain humans needed to repopulate the world, though, then where are they? They can't just be the troops and scientist cadres the player runs into during Fallout 2 and 3. The Poseidon Oil rig from Fallout 2 was supposed to have had a breeding program aboard, but drilling rigs are only so large...it also was home to the remnants of the government's Executive Branch, science labs, and power-armored troops. This argues that the rig only had cloning vats and materials aboard, similar to those found in the Bio Labs of Raven Rock. There certainly wasn't room for much else.
Which brings us back to the Vault-Tec/Alien connection.
As noted, the Vault experiments were designed to take centuries to complete. This sort of long-term planning isn't a real problem if you have Cryo Tubes to sleep in while waiting for it all to come to fruition. Especially not if you can be woken up and put back to sleep at need.
It seems the Master Plan was a deal with the aliens: help them with their genetic engineering and conduct social experiments via the Vaults. For the aliens, the value was obtaining cannon fodder for their own war through the perfection of cloning and genetic manipulation. For the Enclave, it was learning how to manipulate humanity itself in order to impose an eternal police-state society supportive of the military-industrial complex.
The aliens triggered the nuclear exchange between China and the United States by firing its Mothership cannon at any given strategic target during 2077's ongoing ground war. This prompted "responsive strikes", paving the way for the Vault experiments to begin. Note that, in real life, there's a "Doomsday Vault" containing seeds and genetic material of most of Earth's flora. An accompanying genetic bank for its fauna would not be outside the realm of Fallout-universe technology.
So, given that there are plenty of safe places on the planet to secrete such facilities --- and given the influx of alien technology to the Enclave --- would it not be reasonable to assume that, in the sprawling mine complexes of America's many deep salt caverns, there remain cryogenically frozen forms waiting patiently to repopulate the Earth? Are the Enclave that we know of, a relatively small army of scientists, soldiers and politicians, merely its active branch, seeking to cleanse the world before their sleeping brethren can be awakened?
Heh...there's a lot more to this theorizing, but it's already well past the "tl;dr" point for most readers. Anyways, I need to sleep sometime. -
Best thought of as "the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about", they had their hooks into everything --- military contracting, the Vaults, Big Oil, most of the federal Executive Branch, and even alien contact. Their story is what the Fallout universe is essentially wrapped around...but a lot of that story remains untold. It really starts with...
OPERATION SAFEHOUSE
This was a program whereby 122 "Vaults" were built across the United States, each housing and supporting about 1,000 human beings in the event of nuclear war. They were built by a company called Vault-Tec, which got its funding through a series of junk bonds arranged by the Enclave and its affiliated corporations.
But the Vaults weren't really about saving anyone. Instead, each was designed to be a social experiment, many of which were intentionally to continue for hundreds of years beyond any actual nuclear attack. One or two "control" Vaults were actually set up to follow the publically-declared plan of opening up some years after the war so that people could start recolonizing the surface, but even this was meant to be a matter for study.
But if the Vaults didn't save humanity, who did the studies serve? And why?
MOTHERSHIP ZETA
In the early Fallout games, aliens were introduced as an "easter egg" sort of gag. But Fallout 3 made this canon by introducing an alien mothership (two of them, in fact). Aboard the ship, the player discovers a lot of information indicating:
1) The aliens have been abducting and studying humans (commonly involving vivisection) from at least the 1500s through the current day (2277). This included contact with at least one Vault-Tec representative.
2) "Giddyup Buttercup" was a popular toy horse robot prior to Armageddon, which you can tell from aging posters all over the D.C. Wasteland. But the Mothership has an assembly line for them, as well as hundreds in storage. It also has a testing area where not very long ago several wastelanders were killed by one of the larger Buttercup toys.
3) Alien experiments have yielded "Abominations", which appear to be a genetic melding of alien and human life. These are psychotically violent, killing anyone they come near (including aliens), and don't appear to possess rational thought.
4) Despite humanity having only rudimentary spaceflight capacity, alien motherships are equipped with heavy-duty shields and energy weapons with the striking power of a nuclear warhead. Who are they expecting to protect themselves from, if not humanity?
5) Cryo Tubes were able to keep humans whole and alive for most of a millenia, as seen with the thawing of Japanese samurai Toshiro Kago.
Items 1 and 2 suggest that the aliens were working with humans at some corporate level, at minimum. Though it's puzzling to consider why the aliens were still making and testing killer-pony toys a full two centuries after no one on Earth was particularly interested in buying them.
Items 3 and 4 suggest the aliens are engaged in a long-running war with some other alien race, and were interested in developing a "super soldier" in the same way as humans ended up creating "super mutants". They may have actually collaborated on these efforts.
THE ENCLAVE MASTER PLAN
Throughout Fallout history, the Enclave's major plots have been all about (pre-War) eradicating Communism and (post-War) eradicating mutants. In both cases the objective was to take over the planet with pure-strain humans and establish what might best be described as a "fascist utopia" where corporations and government work hand-in-hand to exploit everyone and everything to everyone's (theoretical) benefit.
If the Vaults weren't meant to provide the pure-strain humans needed to repopulate the world, though, then where are they? They can't just be the troops and scientist cadres the player runs into during Fallout 2 and 3. The Poseidon Oil rig from Fallout 2 was supposed to have had a breeding program aboard, but drilling rigs are only so large...it also was home to the remnants of the government's Executive Branch, science labs, and power-armored troops. This argues that the rig only had cloning vats and materials aboard, similar to those found in the Bio Labs of Raven Rock. There certainly wasn't room for much else.
Which brings us back to the Vault-Tec/Alien connection.
As noted, the Vault experiments were designed to take centuries to complete. This sort of long-term planning isn't a real problem if you have Cryo Tubes to sleep in while waiting for it all to come to fruition. Especially not if you can be woken up and put back to sleep at need.
It seems the Master Plan was a deal with the aliens: help them with their genetic engineering and conduct social experiments via the Vaults. For the aliens, the value was obtaining cannon fodder for their own war through the perfection of cloning and genetic manipulation. For the Enclave, it was learning how to manipulate humanity itself in order to impose an eternal police-state society supportive of the military-industrial complex.
The aliens triggered the nuclear exchange between China and the United States by firing its Mothership cannon at any given strategic target during 2077's ongoing ground war. This prompted "responsive strikes", paving the way for the Vault experiments to begin. Note that, in real life, there's a "Doomsday Vault" containing seeds and genetic material of most of Earth's flora. An accompanying genetic bank for its fauna would not be outside the realm of Fallout-universe technology.
So, given that there are plenty of safe places on the planet to secrete such facilities --- and given the influx of alien technology to the Enclave --- would it not be reasonable to assume that, in the sprawling mine complexes of America's many deep salt caverns, there remain cryogenically frozen forms waiting patiently to repopulate the Earth? Are the Enclave that we know of, a relatively small army of scientists, soldiers and politicians, merely its active branch, seeking to cleanse the world before their sleeping brethren can be awakened?
Heh...there's a lot more to this theorizing, but it's already well past the "tl;dr" point for most readers. Anyways, I need to sleep sometime. -
