BetMGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has everything for the action on the ice. Hockey fans in Canada can place live bets, create same game parlays, take player props on their favorite skaters, and bet on the 2026 Stanley Cup champion, including if that team will be from Canada or the USA. BetMGM also has original bets, which are hockey markets you can't find anywhere else. And it's not just about what you can do on game day.
The BetMGM app has improved its lineup this season to include instant withdrawals, data insights, and a brand new reward tub. Download the BetMGM app today and enjoy the NHL like never before. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only.
Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close you, please contact Connect Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Robots Radio.
Games. Lore. Stories. Community.
Just press play. Welcome to the Fallout Lorecast, the podcast that explores the boundaries of our knowledge about the world of Fallout. Welcome back to the Fallout Lorecast. This is your host, Tom, or Robots.
And today, we are discussing another vault. Yes, there's another vault from Fallout 76 that wasn't really fleshed out back four years ago, almost five years ago now, when I was doing my vault series. So, vault 96 is the topic today, and this is a vault that is known as an arc for the atomic age. And when you think of arc, then you probably are going to be thinking about...
Hey, everybody. I'm back. Oh, hey. Hey, buddy.
Wait a minute. Didn't you run out in the last episode while we were recording? You got upset because I didn't call you... Yeah, I'm a real boy.
I'm a real boy. Okay, so you're a real boy. But I thought you were mad, and I haven't seen you in like the last week. Yeah.
I had to go do some self-discovery. Mm-hmm. Okay. What does that mean?
Well, I ran out into the wasteland and quickly realized that I didn't know where I was going or found a place to live. So, I built myself a little house. A little wooden house that I lived in for the last week. Okay.
It was raining a lot. How did you... I mean, did it hold up? Did it leak?
Oh, yeah. It leaked. It's crazy. And then some radiated squirrels decided to live in my house with me, and then some bunnies and a turtle and some other things.
But they were all mutated. Like, the squirrel had the antlers, and the turtle had the head of the bear. That doesn't even sound possible. But wait, so it was raining, and you took refuge in a little house with a bunch of animals?
Yeah, I knew the wind knocked the house over and turned into a boat, and I sailed all the way back here. Wait, so you had an arc where you saved animals? Like Moses? Yeah, basically.
Okay. Well, that's very coincidental that we happen to be talking about Vault 96, the arc for the Atomic Age today, buddy bot. Oh, cool. Yeah, it's going to be a good one.
Anyway, I'm glad you're back. Why don't you go... Oh, wait, the animals. Yeah, go get the animals out of my house.
Yeah, go put them... Okay, I'll put them on the side. Yeah, and you're right. That turtle absolutely does have a head of a bear.
Okay, welcome to the show, everybody. So let's talk about Vault 96. Vault 96, like many of the vaults, or actually all of the vaults, I guess you could say, was constructed before the bombs dropped. This one specifically in 2074.
And this is one of those vaults where the concept was to actually use it for something very specific, aside from testing on people. And some of that does happen, but there's a very specific purpose here. The idea was if... And this goes back to the concept of the vault in general.
The vaults being a test place for if you were to take a bunch of people and send them off into the stars to go settle another planet somewhere, how would they survive? What kinds of things would they be resilient towards? All of that kind of thing. End of doing that, you would probably need some food sources, but there was also the idea that, well, if we can send a bunch of people out into the stars, then potentially we could bring a bunch of animals as well.
But of course, the public story of this vault was something different. Its public mission was to monitor post-war surface conditions and the damage caused genetically to local fauna and introduce species to restore ecological balance, which makes sense as well, right? Like if the bombs drop and you have to repopulate the world with squirrels and turtles, then you're going to need to monitor what's happening to the squirrels and turtles and potentially have some squirrels and turtles safe in a vault that you can put back into the wild and then they repopulate the regular squirrels and turtles out there, right? Well, of course, this doesn't go exactly the way that you would expect it to, or maybe it does at this point.
The scientists who were put into this vault were given what is called an addendum to their plan. This revealed the true mission, which was much more complex. The idea was that they would conduct genetic experiments and explore the mutated fauna, the ones out in the wasteland, to develop countermeasures to them, not just storing and monitoring the external fauna, the creatures out in the wasteland, and then re-releasing natural ones that aren't mutated, but actually trying to come up with countermeasures in order to deal with any of the animals outside in the world that would pose a threat to repopulating with what would have been like the natural animals or human beings, right? That kind of thing.
Now, all of this was being run by an overseer, sort of. It was one of those vaults where the overseer was more of a figurehead. The residents, the scientists who were the residents of this vault thought the overseer was the one making all the decisions, but in actuality, there was a computer, a mainframe, that was scheduling things and organizing things. Now, this entire vault was supposed to last 250 weeks at least.
So 250 weeks, 52 weeks in a year, that's almost five years. So five years of research, and specifically for the vault residents, scientists doing the work, they had weekly quotas. They had to produce enough information and do enough experiments every week to meet their quotas. And this vault was, I mean, all of the vaults have some form of, I don't know, inhumane thing going on, right?
There's something going on here, but this one very specifically was different. In the case here, if you didn't meet your quotas, you were terminated. And not terminated in a job sort of terminated, like hit the road, buddy, go find another job. Terminated in like the Terminator kind of way, you were killed and removed from the vault.
Now, what makes this even crazier is that this was not a vault with dozens or hundreds of people in it. This vault contained five people, only five people, the overseer and four, quote, residents. So the overseer is Eric DeMarcos, who you will hear more about in the future. And then there's Jeanette Higgins, Hans Memling, Nina Vallea, and Molly Cooper.
And each of these were extremely gifted scientists. And each of these individuals was handpicked and notable for some of their accomplishments that they had previously made out in the real world before the bombs dropped, right? So Eric DeMarcos, the overseer, was formerly the dean at Vault Tech University. And he was a brilliant software developer.
Then you have Jeanette Higgins, who I mentioned. She was the developer of the Assaultron class robot. She was the senior engineer at Robco Industries and chief robotics technician in this vault. So she was doing some of the robot stuff and testing.
And it's all, even though it was mostly about animals. She had the robot side of it. Then Hans Memling was the former CTO of ArcJet Systems and professor emeritus at Hamlin University and the chief engineer of the vault. Then there's Nina Vallea, who was the founder of Chromax Genetics and chief researcher in this specific vault.
And then there's Molly Cooper, who was a researcher at Chromax Genetics. And then in this vault, she held the title of chief biologist. So this entire thing was set up so that you have these genetic researchers, these programmers, people who understood machinery and robots and robotics and all of that in order to maintain the way the system would run. So it's a little bit crazy that you would think that if any one of them didn't reach their quota, that they would be let go because it's not like you had any redundancy.
You can just bring in another geneticist, especially while everyone's locked in a vault. So that part's a little bit weird. But here's what happens. The entire system is not explained to the four other residents.
And the way it works is basically the two biologists are the ones who need to be producing the most data. And they collect credits every week, right? The credits go towards the quota. The other two are there to support the inquiries into the data, the scientific process, all of that kind of thing.
And on top of that, the residents don't know that the overseer is not really in charge. And it plays out in a very specific way. They start doing tests on the creatures. And because the, remember I talked about that the real point of this vault was in order to develop creatures that could combat the mutations of the creatures out in the wasteland.
Well, they start having them fight each other and they're messing with FEV. That's kind of the underlying thing about this vault is the genetic mutations are done through administration of the FEV virus, which is kind of the all-encompassing thing. It's another one of those like you say and go, oh, okay, because this is the way things work and fall out, right? So the scientists start mutating specific creatures and having them fight each other.
And then they're documenting which mutations are stronger, which ones win out, which creatures. It's almost like they're creating a natural survival of the fittest, but in a non-natural setting and forcing it to, basically they're forcing forced evolutionary virus. They're forcing evolution in a scientifically maintained arena to happen faster. And then pitting all the animals against each other to see which ones survive.
Just like what would happen in nature if all of these mutations all of a sudden got out, you would see which eventually certain animals would die sooner, some animals would not, and they would pass on that trait. That's the way evolution works. And so they're doing this in a very compressed time frame. And over the next three years, they've tested all of these different creatures with all these different mutations.
And at first, they're getting what seem to be natural mutations, the kinds of mutations that creatures in the real world actually have. So for example, there are non-venomous snakes, but there are venomous snakes. At some point, reptiles evolved the ability to have venom. It's a very natural thing, right?
Regeneration, that's another thing. So for example, we've got these little lizards that run around out in the wild in Florida, and if they lose their tails, the tails grow back. They have regenerative properties. Also, electrogenesis.
So for example, like an electric eel, some creatures are able to release electric shock from their bodies. So these are the kinds of things that they were testing initially, because I guess the assumption here is that they evolve more naturally, and so they're easier to get these kinds of evolutions, these kinds of mutations in the specific group. But by week 100, so now two years into it, they start discovering some new mutations, new mysterious mutations start showing up. Now, why is that?
Well, there's a piece of the vault that I haven't mentioned before. And if you played Fallout 76, you might go, wait a minute, isn't this place like frozen over? What about the cryogenics? There's a whole cryogenics thing going on.
So one of the last parts of the vault to be added in, to be constructed and added in, was a cryogenics section, cryogenics bay 86. This was installed, and with it came a mysterious entity known only as X001. Now, this section of the vault was off limits to the residents. It was something that the mainframe itself handled and maintained.
That is, until all of a sudden, the biologists are able to use some of the genetic parts of whatever this X001 is. Here, check out genetics log 143. Genetic log week 148, 148. There is little progress to report.
Too little. The shifting mutation is still unstable. When stressed, subjects will shift, or phases, or whatever it is. It works, but it's inconsistent, uncontrollable.
Without some understanding of the underlying physics or biology, there is little I can do to stabilize or improve on it. If I could study the original specimen, perhaps I could make some progress. But there is apparently only one subject in a secured cryogenics bay with military access controls. I have no doubt Eric could get in, but he has refused.
I have put everything into this research. I'm out of time. I will not make my quota. Forgive me, Molly.
Now, you can hear in this log a few things. One, there's only one of these creatures. Two, Nina believes that Eric is actually in control of this. And the whole time they've been in this vault, Eric has acted like he's 100% in control.
He is the overseer. He's the only one who knows that it's really the mainframe that's kind of, I don't know, keeping them all there, enslaving all of them for this work. And he's willing to take the brunt of their anger and frustration because he's not wanting to open up about it yet. And there's a reason for that.
And because of this, the residents, the scientists working, have become extremely frustrated with him. And they are now struggling to figure out what these mutations are and how to handle them. The mutations are doing all sorts of crazy stuff because if you've played Fallout 76, you know that there are some crazy mutations that you can get yourself. And they are running out of time to figure out how to analyze and deal with the data in order to meet their quota.
And notice the whole, like, forgive me, Molly. Nina's apologizing to Molly because if she doesn't meet the quota, she is terminated. And Molly is left there by herself as the only biologist. Things are not looking good for Nina, but there's definitely some other stuff going on, which we'll talk about after the break.
So don't go anywhere. You know how sometimes you look in the mirror and you think, if only I could lose that extra weight. And you've been trying and trying. Well, have you considered weight loss by HIMSS?
It's designed to support losing weight and keeping it off. And they now offer an affordable range of FDA-approved DLP-1 medications, including the Wagovi pill and the Wagovi pen. It helps you regulate your appetite and eat less. And in combination with both a better diet and exercise, you can lose 20% more weight.
And you can get it easily with HIMSS. Everything happens online. They connect you to a licensed provider who will determine if this is the right treatment for you. Then, if prescribed, they'll ship it to you right to your door.
No insurance necessary. And on top of that, they support you beyond just selling you the thing. They'll support you with messaging from their care team. There's also an in-app lifestyle and nutrition support that includes recipes and meal plans, fitness videos, sleep content.
Simply put, they will dial in exactly what you need in order to reach your goals. So if you're ready to reach your goals, visit HIMSS.com. All Out Lore to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you. That's H-I-M-S dot com slash All Out Lore.
Hims dot com slash All Out Lore. Weight loss by Hims is not available in all 50 states. WGOVI is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, WGOVI clinical study information and restrictions, visit Hims dot com.
Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has everything for the action on the ice. Hockey fans in Canada can place live bets, create same game parlays, take player props on their favorite skaters, and bet on the 2026 Stanley Cup champion, including if that team will be from Canada or the USA. Bet MGM also has original bets, which are hockey markets you can't find anywhere else. And it's not just about what you can do on game day.
The Bet MGM app has improved its lineup this season to include instant withdrawals, data insights, and a brand new reward tub. Download the Bet MGM app today and enjoy the NHL like never before. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only.
Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connect Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge, Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hello there, old chap.
Good to see another of General Atomic's finest still you get a serve. All right, welcome to the middle of the show. This is where we get to thank our patrons, and we don't have any new patrons this week to shout out, but we do have our Tier 5 Sentrybots, Dylan R. and Larry D.
Thank you so much for your support, and all 71 of the rest of our patrons. Thank you for supporting the show. I couldn't do it without you. And BuddyBot appreciates you, too.
Yeah, all right. Nothing, BuddyBot. You keep doing your turtle stuff or whatever you're doing. But if you'd like to check out the Patreon, patreon.com slash falloutwarcast is the place to do it.
You can get ad-free episodes. You can get episodes a day early. If you're working your way through the catalog, it's probably faster to just spend a little bit of money and then get all the episodes without any ads and then continue working your way through. But then again, if you're listening to this episode, you're way down the list already.
So whatever. But thank you for the support. We really do appreciate it. Me and BuddyBot.
That's the week. We also have a review from Apple Podcasts. This is from Mama Murphy's a baddie. Is Mama Murphy a baddie?
I don't know. You're going to make people debate that on the Discord. If you think Mama Murphy's a baddie, then post something on the Discord about it. Mama Murphy's a baddie from Canada writes, the best fallout content for your ear holes.
If you're a fallout fan, this is the podcast for you. When I'm not roaming the wastelands, I'm listening to Tom fill me in on all the fallout lore I may have missed. It's a perfect blend of knowledge, humor, and thought-provoking discussions that you won't find anywhere else. Cheers from Little America.
I like that Little America. I always call Canada America's hat because that's just funny to me for some reason. I don't know why, now that I've thought about that. But thank you to everybody who helps out the show and helps support us.
If you leave a review with some words on Apple Podcasts with five-star review, I will read it out on a future episode of the show. Also, you can rate us on Spotify. You can share us with your friends. If you listen to another podcatcher and it has ratings and reviews, you can do stuff on there, although I probably won't be able to see it because there's just so many other ones out there.
But thank you to everyone for the support. I really do appreciate it. Let's move on with the rest of the show. If you have any questions about Muca Worlds, I'd be delighted to answer them.
So we're now 148 weeks into this vault experiment. Nina's not making progress on these tests. She can't hit the quota. It's actually 568 credits at this point.
It's like the numbers keep going up. And she doesn't have access to Specimen X001, whatever that is. And so she's not able to do what she needs to do. So she is punished.
She's killed. She's terminated by the mainframe. And this prompts the rest of the team to confront Eric because they think he's still responsible. Now, Eric was doing something for the last almost three years in the background while everyone thought that he was this terrible overseer and driving them all into this ridiculous requirement that would have them eventually killed, which happens here.
Eric is trying to work on a way to combat the mainframe so that they can escape this vault. He was as much a prisoner as the rest of them. And he was willing to take their anger and frustration in order to keep doing what he was doing. Now, let's take a look at this.
Remember who he is. He was the former dean at Vault Tech University. And he was the chief software developer of the vault. In the background, this entire time, over the last three years, he was working on a virus, something that could combat the mainframe computer, short-circuit it, give them control over the vault so that they could leave.
He called this SERAPH. S-E-R-A-P-H. This was a computer virus that could absolutely shut down the mainframe, just turn it off so that they could leave the vault. Now, the events of the day of the escape didn't happen to plan.
Eric briefs the rest of the residents on what's actually been going on. They unleash the virus into the system. And then this happens. And down.
Go, go, go, go. Robotics control failure in the mainframe wing. Activating emergency fabrication protocol, FS-401. Jeanette, the circuit's M1857.
Got it. Fabrication system offline. Activating emergency repair protocol, CR-889. Hey, nice.
Hans, we need a reactor brownout. All right, give me a minute. Auto-9's next. Jeanette?
Ready on the detonator. Molly, are you in? Sorry, sorry. Just a...
Roundout in three, two, one. Power fluctuations detected in the engineering wing. Activating emergency stabilization protocol, ES-109. Detonation in the cryogenics wing.
That should do it. Activating superseding protocol, Omega. Eric? That's not in the database.
What? I'm locked out. Here, I got it. Cover the door.
Damn it. Almost. Data upload from compromise system detected. Suspect data stream has been quarantined.
What? Bypass. Bypass. So as you can hear in the ensuing chaos, they release the virus.
The machine starts to shut down. It starts taking countermeasures against this. And Eric knows what these countermeasures are. He's been studying the programming and understands what kinds of things are in the database, what things it's going to do.
And so they have counters to this. And they respond. And the machine, the mainframe, responds. And then they react, right?
Over and over again. Until the mainframe uses superseding protocol, Omega. Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet. This protocol was not in the database.
This was the one response that the mainframe had to the last minute reaction to them escaping the vault by killing them. And Eric could not predict this. He did not see it in the database. Now, whether he slipped up and just missed something, or this was somehow coded in another location or a different way that the system was hiding it.
Either way, they're all killed. But the side effect of all this was that the virus did make its way through the mainframe. And even after this protocol was initiated and the people inside the vault were killed, eventually the mainframe was shut down by the virus. Now, this opened up the doors, and these mutated animals escaped into the wasteland.
Now, the vault also triggers an emergency management system to call for assistance. So in the game, we visit this vault during the Daily Ops. This is one of the Daily Ops locations. And some of the mutated creatures are the results of this vault.
Also, the doors open up, and so the cryo chamber is released into the rest of the vault as well. So the whole vault is frozen over. That's why this looks like Mr. Freeze's lair when you get to it.
But this is what happens. There were only five scientists. They all die, and things are released out into the world. Mutations get out.
Creatures get out. We have some of you can see in the vault. If you explore it, if you walk around, you can see some of the holding cells where they're keeping different creatures like saligasters and other things that they had somehow gotten into the vault and were doing tests on, or creatures that were mutated from inside the vault itself. Now, fun little note here, the cryopods found in the vault are exactly the same as the ones you find in vault 111, which is a really cool callback to Fallout 4, but it also makes sense that these two vaults were constructed by Vault-Tec and would have similarities.
But there's one question that remains. This mysterious specimen, X001, what is it? And people have been debating this. This is something that we don't have official confirmation on, but there are definitely some hints about what it might be.
And there's a number of debates online about this, but I'm going to pull this one because I think this one is particularly interesting. This one comes from Reddit. This is user Laser3 on Reddit. This was posted about a year ago.
And the question of the post is, what is specimen X001, right? People are wondering about this online. Laser response, currently we have no idea, but it's some sort of alien without question. But I do want to draw your attention to something else.
Vault 96 is directly responsible for the daily ops mutants, and this alien's DNA is the key. Notice how in the holotapes slash logs, it's able to spread its DNA between dishes without them touching. And notice how the last test group has a mutation that sounds exactly like resilient and how it operates in daily ops. And that's not even counting several other mutations noted in the logs that are very similar to what we see in the ops.
Knowing this in the reference to the enclave in decryption, I believe there's an active enclave holdout who has the data from 96 and uses it to interfere with BOS operations. The process is simple. One, identify a location with uplinks slash a good population to hide interceptors in. Two, perform genetic modification on subject zero with additional enhancements.
This is the boss of the op. If necessary, lure hostiles in to act as defense. Three, allow 12 hours for mutations to transmit between subjects. Since the alien DNA didn't transfer to the scientists, it seems to only spread for a certain period of time after splicing.
And four, prime the kill switch if subject zero dies or interceptors are deactivated. This can be thrown if something goes wrong and prevents what occurred with a source from happening again. Ta-da, instant interference with BOS ops that can be ran on a daily basis. It's an interesting theory.
I'd like to hear what you guys think about this. And the concept here is that the DNA that's being used to drive the really, really crazy mutations comes from some sort of alien. And we know across the events in Fallout 76, the alien invasion, there are some hidden locations where people were doing experiments on aliens. For Vault 76 to have one of these alien bodies, and that's the DNA they've been using to do experiments, could make a lot of sense.
It all kind of fits together. And this, it's kind of outlandish, this theory about Enclave and what's running the daily ops, but it kind of matches too. That the Enclave might have some knowledge over an alien body that was being studied in a vault because of the connection between Vault Tech and Enclave pre-war. So all of these things could connect.
I think this theory might have some legs. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think that's what's actually going on here? Is it a good description for the daily ops and how these can be ongoing, reoccurring things in the world?
What do you think? I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you go check out Vault 96. And until next time, stay safe in the wasteland.
Try not to, you know, get stuck in a vault and have to do a bunch of experiments on genetically modified monsters. I'll see you next time. Bye, everybody. To plug into everything else we're doing, check out robotsradio.net.
Reach out to me on Twitter at robots underscore radio. Check out the Robots Radio Rocket Club where you can join me and a bunch of our other creators creating your podcast, starting a new podcast, or helping your current podcast grow. There's more information about that on robotsradio.net as well. And you can always talk with us and the entire community, over 2,000 people on the Robots Radio Discord.
Come join us. We love this job video. See you guys next time.