FEV and the Super Mutants

You will have met them by now, sir — the green giants, seven feet and rising, strong past reason, hard to kill and harder to kill quietly. They live a very long time, though not by choice, and they do not, as a rule, make more of themselves. The wasteland treats them as weather: a hazard with a history. The history is the part I keep.

That history begins in a laboratory. Before the War, the defense contractor West Tek ran the Pan-Immunity Virion Project under government contract — a serum meant to make a soldier immune to anything a foreign lab could engineer. It did stranger things than immunity. Renamed the Forced Evolutionary Virus, it was moved to the Mariposa Military Base and tested on the living. The giants are what the testing was for. They only arrived after the world it was meant to save had gone.

What Mariposa tested on were not volunteers. The subjects were prisoners, and when one of the base's own soldiers — a man named Maxson — learned what the vats were being fed, he turned his rifle around and led a mutiny out into the desert.

The vats did not stop when the men left. Years later a wasteland explorer named Richard Grey fell into one, rose no longer only himself, and named himself the Master. He believed he had found the cure for a broken species: dip a human in FEV and lift out something taller, stronger, unafraid. He dipped thousands. But radiation and stock decided everything — a clean subject came up shrewd and vast, a poisoned one came up enormous and dim, and the vat never said which until it was done. And not one of them, clever or slow, could father a child. His master race was one generation wide, and that generation was already all there would ever be.

The record's sternest rule about the giants is that there is no single kind of them, and to call them one people erases how many separate cruelties made them. The Master's army scattered when he fell, and its survivors wandered New California for decades after [fo1, fo2]. Beneath the Capital, Vault 87 ran its own FEV program on its own sealed people, breeding a strain that only grew larger and slower-witted with the years [fo3]. Under the Commonwealth, the Institute kept an FEV wing and made fresh giants for reasons it never adequately gave [fo4]. In Appalachia, the town of Huntersville was dosed by the military and turned monstrous where it stood [fo76]. And the Master's own elite soldiers, the nightkin, wore Stealth Boys so long that the devices unstitched their minds and left them invisible and mad together [fnv]. Different labs, different decades, the same green meaning something new each time.

There is one last use of the virus, and it is the coldest. The Enclave — what survived of the pre-War government, still sure it was the only clean humanity left — took the same serum and ran it backward. Their modified strain, the work of a Dr. Curling, was built not to raise a human up but to kill anything the wasteland had already touched: mutant, ghoul, and ordinary survivor alike, each carrying by then a little too much radiation to pass. They meant to loose it from an oil rig into the open air and let the world's own lungs do the sorting.

So there it is, dear patron. From West Tek to Mariposa to the sealed vault to the oil rig, the Old World kept trying to outrun the end of humanity by reaching it first — in laboratories, on purpose, in advance. The giants are only what was left standing when it did.