FREV Chapter 01 (Patreon)

Omniscient Point of View

America had annexed Canada for easier access in the war to retake Alaska from the Chinese menace. In the process, many rights were stripped from the Canadian people. While fighting a war against China, America also had to quell the riots popping up near newly installed military bases along the East Coast leading up to Alaska. Many rioters were gunned down in the process building a significant resentment towards America.

Little did the Canadians know that a secret team was sent to build the most secretive bunker known to mankind hundreds of miles from the supply lines just several miles away from Lake Nipigon. The top one percent of America was to become the Enclave after the war and the top one percent of the Enclave was to know and work inside this base in Canada.

Bringing in the most highly intelligent people to work even after the bombs fell, the process of evolving humanity would begin after the nuclear annihilation of the masses. It wouldn’t be until hundreds of years later that they’d emerge from their bunker, retake everything, and build it in their own image. At least, that was the plan.

Everything had worked how they had originally planned in the beginning. All the highest-ranking military personnel, most brilliant scientists, and charismatic politicians were moved in just hours before the first bombs were dropped. It was all their plan in the first place but the true leadership of the Enclave was the only one who knew the full story. Not only were they the ones to drop the bombs, they did it to their own people as well. 

They had rushed their plans, there were too many intelligent people outside of their group who knew what was coming and were preparing for it. They gained word that House, the head of the Las Vegas strip would have an anti-nuclear system set up in days when they launched their attack. It was too soon, they needed more time but to stop a future threat they needed to drop the bombs when they did.

Even before the bombs fell the scientists began working on many projects to develop the perfect human, the perfect weapons, and the perfect fighting force for when they did finally emerge. The weapons were easy enough, they had already made the most advanced power armor and now they just needed to keep iterating on it until it was perfected beyond the scope of danger when outside.

They developed the suit's capabilities in three different directions. One was the scout suits, they would be less armored but still require a fusion core to function. It came with a camouflage function and could run the same speed as a car for a short distance. Even still it would be one of the most defensive pieces of equipment and the cost to make a dozen suits was a quarter of America’s previous yearly budget.

The second way they developed the suits was towards the ground troops. Many of the functions of the suit were stripped down removing the need for a fusion core to run but only those with peak human strength could effectively use them for any amount of time longer than a few hours. An even more limited version was made for less important troops which was a completely stripped-down version, only giving a moderate amount of defense against gunfire compared to the others.

The final version of the suit was developed to be the most powerful and capable of the bunch. Only the commanding generals of the army were permitted to wear these and each was the same cost to make as the dozens of scout suits that were made. It came with all the bells and whistles, including the newest version of the pip-boy built directly into its hud.

If the person was wearing the pip-boy 4000, they could effectively double the computing capacity of the armor itself, both pip-boys working in tandem to increase the output of the power armor’s functions. The new pip-boy design they went for was smaller, it was about half the size of the 3000 with four times the computing power than the previous version.

The weaponry was perhaps where they sunk as much time as the armor. The focus was on two ranged weapons and three melee weapons but many solely unique weapons were made for the generals who all had particular ways of fighting. The bread and butter weapon made is the recharger weaponry. This went for recharger pistols, rifles, and shotguns. They had a self-contained mechanism that would refill missing ammo at the rate of a bullet a second.

The recharger weaponry was made for the ground troops with the higher-ups being equipped with the perfected Gauss rifles. Truly a weapon designed for killing, with enough firepower to bring down almost anything it hit, the new Gauss rifles were made more efficient and could fire a thousand rounds off a single fusion core. Not only that but they were also slightly more powerful than the rifles that used electromagnetic cartridges. 

The standard melee weaponry given to ground troops was mass-produced combat swords. The swords were a two-foot length of steel that functioned as a utility tool on top of being the primary melee weapon of the ground troops. The scouts were given double-bladed ripper chainsaws that would have two chains spinning in opposite directions to more effectively cripple or kill. The final option for the leader was a choice between a flaming sword and a power gauntlet. 

Besides the handful of scientists they left to continuously adapt and evolve the weaponry the Enclave leadership would use, they also were keeping a fighting force awake to train and prepare for the future. Thousands of men and women were all selected to take part in the process of becoming the ground troops for when the Enclave finally decided to act.

They had no idea that the vault they were in was collecting data on several other scientific tests and they were subjected to many changes involving those test vaults. The entire vault plan was just an elaborate data-gathering scheme to help them build the strongest fighting force when they did decide to finally act. They had devised many strategies and brainwashing methods to strengthen their fighting force over the next years.

The most effective method was selective breeding and a cast system. Only those given the right to mate would be allowed to while others were castrated to reduce the chances of children with any deformities developing. The small resistance to the methods being employed ended with rifle fire as the entire vault was under surveillance.

This led to the true reason for the vault. The development of the true plan, nicknamed operation ‘New Human’ devised several methods to strengthen humanity and were in the process of perfecting them when the first problem for the vault showed itself.