A vault in Fallout might overshadow the others. Because the incident was so horrific that hardly anyone survived…
The vaults of Fallout are the focal point of the story. But behind the seemingly peaceful bunkers for the salvation of humanity lies almost always a dark secret. Particularly grim is the story behind the infamous “Vault 11.” We’ll tell you what happened there.
Spoiler warning: If you haven’t watched the Fallout series or played the games yet, you will get some light spoilers.
What are the vaults? To protect humanity from the inevitable nuclear war and ensure that enough people exist after the Great War to repopulate the world, Vault-Tec created the “vaults.” These are massive underground bunker complexes that can essentially function autonomously for several centuries.
Individuals who were particularly wealthy or important could buy a spot for themselves or their family in a vault — at horrendous prices.
What Vault-Tec and their business partners concealed, however, was that the vaults also serve a completely different purpose. Almost every one of the 120 different vaults is also an experiment. Sometimes these are social experiments, like the notorious Vault 69, and sometimes they are scientific experiments, often with morally questionable methods, such as deliberately contaminating the residents.
There are also vaults where no experiments were conducted. These are management vaults — only these were really designed for the protection and monitoring of the other vaults.
What is Vault 11? The vault with the number 11 might be familiar to some veterans, as it appears in the game Fallout New Vegas. What may look like a standard vault at first glance, however, hides quite a large and dark secret.
After the residents of the vault moved in, they received a message from the main computer:
Each year, one vault resident must be brought to a specific chamber and sacrificed; only then can the vault operate for another year.
If the residents do not decide on the sacrifice, then the supply of the vault would be shut down.
Within Vault 11, this led to a custom where every year the chosen overseer was sacrificed after their term expired. Thus, the overseer had significant decision-making power for a year but was sacrificed at the end of the year for the well-being of the vault.
What happened in Vault 11? The exact events in Vault 11 are quite grim. Different factions formed that tried to control the political affairs of the vault. Meanwhile, the election of the overseer was abused as a means of power. A vault resident was forced into sexual acts by threatening to choose her husband as the overseer otherwise.
This very woman, Katherine Stone, also became a leader. She murdered her enemies and changed the vault’s system so that the main computer should randomly select a person as overseer each year.
The political groups within the vault saw their power endangered and tried to prevent this decision — armed conflicts ensued.
How did the Vault 11 experiment end? At the end of the fights, only 5 residents survived. Tired from the battles and the shock, they confronted the computer and said that they would no longer sacrifice another person.
Instead of shutting down life support, however, the computer said:
Congratulations, you are a shining example for humanity and have passed the test. The door of the vault will now be opened.
Or in other words: The experiment of the vault was to resist the directive of sacrificing a human every year.
Shaken by the realization, 4 of the 5 survivors killed themselves. The last stepped into the freedom of the wasteland — and what happened to him, only the wasteland knows…
What other vaults are there? If you explore a bit in the Fallout universe, you’ll find many other morally reprehensible vaults. In addition to the vaults from the series, namely numbers 31, 32, and 33, there is also Vault 106. Here, residents were permanently put on drugs, leading to bizarre behavior.
What do you think of the stories surrounding the vaults? Too absurd? Or just right for such a universe?
