Vault 19 ofFallout: New Vegasfeatures yet another one of Vault-Tec’s questionable social experiments. This time, it involves blatant deception, subliminal messaging, and pitting vault residents against each other.
Vault 19 is located west of the Whittaker Farmstead and east of Bonnie Springs on the map ofFallout: New Vegas. The player can find the entrance to the vault on the floor of a small parking lot booth.
RELATED:Fallout: New Vegas - The Worst Fates Companions Can Face
Vault 19’s Paranoia Experiment
Vault-Tec built Vault 19 primarily to test ways of inducing paranoia through “non-violent and non-chemical means.” It’s one of the most uniquevaults in theFalloutseriesbecause it has two overseers. As such, the entire facility is separated into two sections — the red sector and the blue sector. Vault residents were then segregated based on unknown parameters into these two sectors.
Reading through the terminal entries from both sectors reveals that there was some animosity between the reds and the blues. Either side was convinced that the other was up to something, whether it’s sabotaging resources, stealing supplies, or even trying to poison residents from opposite sectors. However, all this suspicion was based purely on hearsay, and it was likely exacerbated byVault-Tec’s system inFallout, which was built to send subliminal messages in different ways.
Some of the younger vault residents reported hearing strange, high-pitched noises coming from the vault’s intercoms — a method of subliminal suggestion similar to that ofVault 92 inFallout 3. Sometimes, they even heard voices. However, the older vault residents told the children off, saying that they shouldn’t talk about it as it might worry the other inhabitants. Another vault resident swore that one of the lights in the opposite sector flickered to spell out “SOS” in morse code.
The paranoia only got worse as time went on, leading the vault residents to question perfectly normal things. The most notable example of this was when inhabitants from the blue sector started to wonder about the blue stars under their Sunset Sarsaparillabottle caps inFallout. One person was convinced that the star shouldn’t be there and started to freak out when it wouldn’t go away. Another started collecting the star bottle caps, causing even more suspicion to arise among the vault residents.
RELATED:Fallout: New Vegas - How Vault 11 Systematized Human Sacrifice
The Shady Doctor and Falsified Medical Documents
Another factor contributing to the residents’ paranoia was the vault doctor. She apparently never left her office and had bodyguards watching her at all times. Even at night, a bodyguard was posted right outside her office. This only made the inhabitants more suspicious of her. They began to suspect that she was hiding something, or even that her office was the only place that was truly “safe” in the vault. Eventually, some people from the blue sector decided to investigate the strange doctor.
The residents from the blue sector somehow managed to bypass the bodyguards and hack into the doctor’s computer,looking for some sort of hidden agenda. What they found was a collection of patient files that “looked like those from an asylum.”
For instance, one document describes a patient who often felt as if they were “outside” their body, while another details a patient’s auditory hallucinations, which they believed to be coming from their own head. Though all the names were in code, the people managed to connect them to other residents within Vault 19. Suffice to say, they were utterly shocked by this discovery because no one remembered “being insane.” Later, they broke into the doctor’s office again and found restraints and tons of sedatives — “enough to kill a horse.”
Armed with what they’ve learned, the people from the blue sector confronted the doctor, but she refused to provide any answers. She simply had her bodyguards throw them out of the clinic. The people thenwent to the blue sector’s overseer, who simply acted as if he didn’t know anything about the deception going on. At this point, the residents from the blue sector knew that they couldn’t trust any of the Vault-Tec staff.
After thisFalloutincident, some people noticed the vents in their living quarters pumping out more air than usual at 1:30 in the morning. Whether this was a sedation method or a means of upping the paranoia is unknown. Regardless, the residents asked the vault’s maintenance officer about this, but he informed them that the ventilation system wasn’t having any problems. This led the residents in question to suspect that even the maintenance officer was “in on it” — whatever “it” was.
Accessing the overseer’s terminal reveals that the medical records that were found in the doctor’s office were fake. These had been forged purposefully to cause the residents to doubt themselves and their sanity — and it worked. Though what happened to the vault’s original residents is neverrevealed inFallout: New Vegas, the old terminal entries make it clear that the inhabitants were suspicious of everything and everyone around them. Perhaps the paranoia led to a violent conclusion, or perhaps it was the sulfur from caves beneath the vault that did them in.
Vault 19 in Fallout: New Vegas
By the time The Courier makes their way into the vault, the place is filled with escaped convicts who got away fromFallout’s NCR Correctional Facility. These Powder Gangers are also split into two camps. One side agrees with Samuel Cooke, the original leader who led the prisoner uprising, who wants to stay in the vault and utilize the sulfur caves below to make bombs. Meanwhile, the other side is with Philip Lem, who insists that they should turn themselves in again as they cannot sustain themselves with the current resources.
This dilemma is the focal point oftheFallout: New Vegasside quest“Why Can’t We Be Friends?” As such, the player can decide to side with either Cooke or Lem, but they can also opt to blow the entire place up, killing the escaped convicts inside. Though unrelated to Vault 19’s original story, this quest shows how disagreements and dubious intentions can pit two groups against each other. Admittedly, it’s not done in such a way that’s as interesting as the original Vault-Tec experiment, but it still makes for a fun side mission.
Fallout: New Vegasis available now for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
