This post contains major spoilers for Fallout season two, episode four. If you want to avoid them until you’ve watched, you can instead check out our coverage of episode three.
You’d have to be a fool to trust anyone who worked for Vault-Tec, but you’d have to be especially stupid to trust anyone who served as Bud Askins personal assistant. Fortunately Norm MacLean is very smart, so that’s not a problem. The problem is he should also be very scared. Because “Future Enterprise Ventures” is likely a not-so-subtle code for a notorious and hugely important bioweapon from the Fallout video games, Forced Evolutionary Virus.
As Norm continues to “lead” the junior Vault-Tec executives he woke up from Vault 31, he’s slowly trying to learn more about the evil corporation’s plans. In season two’s “The Demon in the Snow,” he took a big step towards a major discovery. Bud Askins’ assistant, the slimy Ronnie McCurtry, asked his new “boss” if it was time to continue on to Phase 2. The winking Ronnie obviously knows a whole lot about his company’s evil plans. He said he took the lunch orders when Bud met with investors in regards to Future Enterprise Ventures. He called that “whole plan” for Vaults 32 and 33. Ronnie then revealed the plan and Phase 2 are “very important to the experiment.”
That conversation is absolutely terrifying on its own. As we’ve seen in the Fallout Prime Video series and in the video games, Vault-Tec ran experiments on the populations of some vaults. Some experiments were truly nightmarish. The fact the Los Angeles Vaults are important enough the company put its most loyal, most ruthless employees there to personally oversee 32 and 33 for centuries is a bad sign.
Those sweet naive underground denizens have no idea they’re merely test subjects. Whatever experiment Vault-Tec is running in 32 and 33 is likely awful. Especially if it only really kicked in after Reclamation Day, which Ronnie thinks has happened. And because Ronnie referred to this clandestine operation as Future Enterprise Ventures—a.k.a. FEV—we might know exactly how depraved.
In the world of Fallout, years before the bombs dropped, Bud Askins worked for a different defense and research company, West Tek. That corporation invented power armor. It also created a virus with the super pleasant/not horrible name Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV). The name of this bioweapon tells you a lot about its purpose. It can easily change and mutate organic beings DNA. As one character in the games says, it made “infectious evolution” possible.
The virus itself is also easily altered for specific goals. That made it possible for a whole lot of groups and people to make a whole lot of dangerous mutants, monsters, and other creatures. (FEV was not responsible for the creation of Deathclaws, but it did make them even more dangerous.) Forced Evolutionary Virus helped give rise to the Brotherhood of Steel, which considers non-humans abominations. FEV made many of those abominations.
The Forced Evolutionary Virus has played a major role in the Fallout franchise in almost every game. It was also notably used in Vaults 87 and 96, so it’s not a surprise the amoral Bud Askins had big plans—big enough it needed investors—to use it on the people who lived in the Vaults his brain and employees oversaw.
Bud Askins has something horrible planned for the dwellers of 32 and 33. We don’t know what that is exactly, just that it’s bad. We don’t even know where this particular strain of FEV is. (Maybe in Hank’s suitcase the sinister Stephanie is so desperate to get her hands on?) We just know that any employee close to Bud Askins talking about Phase 2 of a secret Vault-Tec experiment with the initials FEV is really bad. You don’t even have to be as smart as Norm to know that.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He thinks FEV looks like Hi-C Ecto Cooler and would probably drink it for that reason. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
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Source: Kiat Media
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