Lore Break: The Forced Evolutionary Virus

Time for another quick talk about the Fallout backstory.  This topic is a pretty important one, because it's about a major contributing factor in the emergence of nearly every mutated, ugly and dangerous species of Fallout wasteland critter: the Forced Evolutionary Virus, or FEV.

If you've played Fallout 3, you probably know FEV best as the stuff responsible for creating these guys:

Not your friends.

But as with most of the Fallout lore, the recent Bethesda contributions aren't nearly the whole story.



In the Fallout universe, the Great War of 2077 was preceded by about twenty years or so of a building global tension and smaller scale conflicts between the major powers, mainly over Earth's remaining and dwindling fossil fuel resources.  China invaded and annexed Alaska.  The U.S. invaded and annexed Canada. Eventually, the U.S. used its new bases in occupied Canada to retake Alaska.  And so on, and so forth.

As is always the case during war, this was a period of technological innovation - and especially, military innovation.  Power armor appeared in the U.S. military, turning American soldiers into walking tanks.  Stealth Boys and other invisibility tech made its way into American and Chinese military hands for stealth missions.  One of the American military contractors responsible for pushing the wartime envelope for the U.S. Army was a California company called West Tek.  They were the ones who created power armor, but they were also working on another important project.

In those years, war wasn't the only major problem.  There was also the New Plague, aka Limit 115, an engineered superdisease created as a U.S. military project for use against China.  Chinese spies, however, managed to steal samples of Limit 115 from a research lab, but the vials shattered during their escape and the New Plague was born in 2052.

West Tek began a bioengineering project to combat the New Plague by boosting the human immunity system to insane levels.  The successful effort was then militarized into a super soldier-type project to create a virus that would radically alter a soldier's physiology, making them not only immune to the New Plague and virtually any other disease, but highly durable to physical damage and incredibly strong.  That line of research led to the Forced Evolutionary Virus.

FEV did the job, but had some bad side effects.  In trials, while it increased damage resistance and immunity efficiency, it also tended to lower intelligence and increase violent behavioral traits.  When the Great War began in 2077, great vats of the stuff still lay hidden in secret military bases located in California, Washington D.C and presumably other places.

How FEV ended up in the general post-nuke environment is a long story.  If you're interested in reading that in detail, the Fallout wiki has a great explanation.

On a side note, FEV also indirectly led to the creation of a major faction in the Fallout universe: the Brotherhood of Steel, an order descended from a U.S. Army group sent only days before the bombs fell to secure Mariposa Base, where primary FEV research was being conducted by West Tek.  When they discovered the FEV human experiments taking place there, the squad declared themselves in full desertion from the U.S. military and executed the Mariposa scientists.  The bombs fell a few days later, and the lost squad took what they could from Mariposa and went into the desert.

As the Fallout in-game timeline picks up, about 150 years later, the descendants of that squad have gone on to become the Brotherhood of Steel.

So that's the general FEV story.  In Fallout canon, critters such as molerats, radroaches, giant ants and even supermutants are basically the results of intense radiation contamination combined with the effects of environmental FEV infection.  Presumably, vats of FEV still lay undiscovered in lost underground military bases throughout the Wasteland, waiting for supermutants, Brotherhood exploration parties or just unlucky scavengers to trip over them.  That has never really had positive consequences for anyone.

Again, the lore gets a lot more complicated (I haven't even mentioned the Master here, for Vault Boy's sake).  If you'd like to know more - and it really is a great story - read all about it on the Fallout wiki.  Or go back to the first Fallout and play the series from the beginning!