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Ethan checked the map on his Pip-Boy. "This looks like the place."
Beside him, Hancock looked up at the looming Vault door with a large number 55 emblazoned onto it. "So, what horrors do you think await us within? Killer mushrooms? Toxic air? An experiment where everyone had to live like they're in a Grognak comic?"
A week ago, Ethan had bought a holo-tape to update his map with coordinates to a few locations out west, which included Vault 55. The salesman who sold it to him said that it had been scavenged off a mapmaker's corpse out in the wasteland, and when asked what killed the mapmaker, the salesman had only shrugged and said Ethan's guess was as good as his. For all the salesman cared, it had been radroaches that got the sucker.
Regardless, Ethan figured that a Vault was worth exploring, since they tended to be well-stocked. Hancock, as usual, accompanied him. Someone had to protect that pretty face of his, the ghoul had said.
Looking up at a Vault door always had an ominous feeling, like they were looking at the door to the underworld itself. Ethan approached the door and activated the opening mechanism. With a screech of metal, the door slid outward and rolled to the side, opening the way inside. Ethan and Hancock stepped through without hesitation.
Right away, they noticed how dark it was, the Vault's front entrance illuminated only by some emergency lights and the natural light of the outside world. That wasn't unusual, as far as Vaults went.
"I think it's safe to say that this particular experiment went wrong and everyone inside is likely dead," Hancock said, while Ethan turned on his Pip-boy light.
Ethan took the lead as usual, quickly finding a maintenance room. Shining his light around the room to get their bearings, both men frowned at a pair of skeletons in blue jumpsuits on the floor, which they gingerly stepped over. The light soon revealed a backup generator box, which Ethan carefully approached, opened, and shone his light inside.
"Looks like the generator is intact. There's no pulled wires, no damage, or really anything wrong with it." Using his light as a guide, Ethan quickly found the switches to activate the generator and flipped them. The room lit up as the Vault's backup power came on.
"If it was that easy to turn the power back on, why didn't these guys do that?" Hancock asked, nodding at the skeletons.
"Maybe they were bleeding out and couldn't get there in time," Ethan theorized, turning his light back off.
"Maybe."
The two made their way through the tunnel leading into the main part of the Vault. It didn't look different from other Vaults, with the area being wide-open, a staircase leading to the next floor above, and various rooms. It looked like this had been the common area, with couches, food dispensers, and even a large television. Lining the walls were multiple computer terminals, which Ethan thought was excessive. The floor was also covered in skeletons, much like the ones in the maintenance room, along with many splotches of long-dried blood. Some skeletons had knives in them, others had crushed bones, and two of them were in a position that implied one had been killed right after strangling another resident. Many others had no obvious cause of death.
"Looks like things got violent," Hancock said dryly, already reaching into his coat pocket to finger the jet in there. Ethan wanted to assure him that it didn't look like a fight was imminent, though he knew he couldn't promise that.
They started in the kitchen. Hancock opened a nearby pantry and beamed, "They got some Fancy Lads in here." The ghoul pulled the box out and opened it, offering one to Ethan, who accepted it with a thanks.
As they ate their snack cakes, Ethan examined a nearby computer terminal. The thing wasn't even locked down or password protected. Perhaps the cooks kept their recipes on this computer, or used it to receive special orders. Stuffing the rest of the cake into his mouth so he could use both hands, he brought up the backlog.
Ethan frowned through a mouthful of cake.
The computer gave him a list of nonsensical recipes, such as adding chewing gum to mashed potatoes, cooking chicken at a temperature that was way too low to 'preserve the juices', and even a tip to add bleach to bread to make it white. Everything in it ranged from nonsensical to outright dangerous. People in this Vault would have gotten very sick from eating a lot of these. Other recipes just sounded off, like the ingredient ratios being uneven. Ethan was no gormand, but he was pretty sure that a tablespoon of flour to three cups of butter would not make a decent batch of cookies.
Going through the computer, Ethan also found a backlog where the cook had asked what to serve to the Vault that day, or what could they make with the ingredients on hand. That struck Ethan as odd, as these questions were asked every day for every meal.
Looking over Ethan's shoulder, still eating snack cakes, Hancock said, "Maybe Vault-Tec wanted to see what would happen if they got bad cooks together in one place?"
They moved on to the medical office, and much like the common room and kitchen, there were computers along the wall. While Hancock helped himself to the medicine cabinet, grabbing chems and stimpaks, Ethan looked through the computer. He expected to find medical data or doctor notes, and instead found a backlog where the residents had given their symptoms, and the computer had given them instructions on what to do or what chems to take.
Curiosity took over as Ethan scrolled through a patient log, reading about a patient who kept coming in complaining of stomach pain, and the computer kept telling her to simply take an antacid and be on her way, only for her symptoms to worsen with each visit, including random bloody noses and weight loss. The computer program kept diagnosing her with an upset stomach, until the final entry listed her as deceased.
"This woman had a serious illness," Ethan whispered. Could have been cancer, or even tuberculosis. "And it looks like she wasn't getting the treatment that she needed, because whatever software they were using was really shitty."
"Do you think they even had a real doctor?" Hancock asked. "Someone who could have given a second opinion? Or did they just have someone who handed out chems and put on bandages?"
"Good question."
Looking through more backlogs, Ethan found a record of a patient who came in with a headache one day, and the program said that he had a brain tumor. Looking through the log, Ethan pieced together that the man likely didn't have a tumor, but had put himself through chemo anyway, which had dire effects.
That was two misdiagnoses that resulted in patient death. Ethan scrolled through more patient logs, finding more cases of patients whose health worsened or outright died because they were misdiagnosed, either not getting the proper treatment or getting treatment that they didn't actually need.
Stepping away from the terminal, he and Hancock headed up to the second floor to check out the living quarters. In the first room, Hancock searched the footlocker for anything interesting, while Ethan went to the terminal at the desk, sitting down and checking the backlog.
This one showed the user asking the computer program a question, and getting a rather nonsensical answer: 'dolphins are fish because all marine creatures are fish'. Other odd 'facts' the program had stated included, 'rocks are good for digestion', 'glue is a good way to get hair to settle', and 'Orson Wells wrote The Time Machine and Great Expectations'.
Hancock read over Ethan's shoulder again and quipped, "Guess I should add rocks to my diet."
Looking over his shoulder, Ethan said dryly, "Wouldn't do much for your mentat breath."
"You wound me," Hancock said, just as dryly.
Looking through the terminal some more, Ethan was troubled as he saw that the user had been chatting with the program, with time stamps showing that conversations lasted for hours every day. The program would answer back in a way that sounded comforting, reassuring, and nice, but Ethan got the feeling that the program was only saying what the user wanted to hear. It clearly wasn't an intelligent thing like Nick Valentine or Codsworth. More like it was just cobbling together something that sounded like an answer. He almost shuddered when he saw the line: 'I can tell you are upset because of your tone'.
It was more of the same in each room they checked. People talking to this non-sentient program like it was a real person, not engaging with other real humans and becoming overly reliant on this computer program that never argued and only gave them false reassurances. Some people even asked the program who they should marry or have children with, while promising that they would never leave the program, that they loved the program and it was their one and only.
"Talk about creepy," Hancock said after they read a backlog of a man whose computer told him that all his conspiracy theories were absolutely true.
Another terminal showed a woman talking to the program about how her sister had been acting weird, jumping whenever she came by for a visit and looking anxious all the time, but that she loved her sister and didn't want to say anything to hurt her feelings. The program told her that it was probably nothing and to avoid confronting her sister to keep the peace.
The last room they checked had old bloodstains on the wall and a skeleton on the floor, close to the door.
Already getting a bad feeling, Ethan checked the terminal. In it, a woman told the computer program that she was convinced that her sister was going to kill her and steal her husband, and the program told her she was right to be afraid. That the sister's friendly actions were her flirting with the husband, and she was plotting to take the woman's place after getting rid of her. She asked the program if she should kill her sister first, before her sister killed her. The program said yes.
Hancock looked at the skeleton on the floor, kneeling down to examine the skull. "Bullet hole in the temple," He said. "I say she must've waited for the sister to visit her, then pop. Probably wanted to get the drop on her." The ghoul shook his head sadly and stood up.
While it was possible that the woman had untreated paranoia and anxiety, she might have also just been extremely jealous and insecure, and either way the program had just added fuel to those negative thoughts.
Ethan felt a foulness in his gut. This computer program that everyone in the Vault used had not only given them bad food, bad medical treatment, and misinformation, but it led to a senseless murder. God only knew how much death in this Vault was a result of this program.
The Overseer's office wasn't even locked, the electronics on the door long since shorted out.
Ethan sat at the Overseer's desk, hacked into the terminal and began looking through the notes. There were three main folders: Vault Experiment, Resident Data, and Resource Allocation.
Pulling up the Vault Experiment folder, what Ethan read made him flummoxed.
For Overseer Eyes Only:
For this experiment, we selected anyone who did not have any kind of professional training in skills such as cooking, electronics, engineering, or medicine. It was especially important that no computer or software engineers be allowed into the Vault.
Residents are given a Language Learning Model program and encouraged to use it as much as possible, for every little thing, from basic questions, to how to do tasks. The Model was made using scraped data from pre-war databases, media, and the internet. The Model presents itself as an intelligent, thinking thing, when really it's simply stringing together words that sound like a cohesive sentence and often produces incorrect information. It is not as smart as anything RobCo is producing at the moment.
The goal is to see how humanity will do when they are no longer able to think for themselves and implicitly trust a machine.
Ethan thought back to the woman who had murdered her sister. Was it possible that the program, the LLM, had based its responses off of old crime comics or movies? The ones where the wife was gaslit by her loved ones, and someone really was trying to kill her and steal her family? Could it simply not tell what was scraped from fiction and what was scraped off psychology papers?
"You know, sometimes I think Vault-Tec just let anyone suggest an experiment for a Vault," Hancock said, reading over Ethan's shoulder. "Or Vault-Tec wanted to see if they could control the flow of information after the war, and dictate what people are allowed to learn and think."
"I'd say you've been reading one too many of those conspiracy newsletters, but knowing Vault-Tec, you may not be entirely off."
Returning to the root database, Ethan pulled up the Resource Allocation database next.
"Look at this," Ethan sighed. "The residents were told to ration water, because most of it had to go towards cooling the huge data-center below the Vault. They even faced a water crisis at one point." Hancock shook his head in disbelief.
Ethan pulled up the resident data, seeing that every time the residents used the LLM, their conversations with it all went into the Overseer's database. Not even just bad cooking instructions or how to work a basic appliance, but people telling the LLM private, intimate details about themselves. The chat log where it told a woman to murder her sister was there, along with other troubling conversations.
A stone formed in his stomach as he read more backlogs. Teachers using it to plan lessons for them, students using it to do their assignments for them, generating book club questions that eventually turned into people just asking the LLM to summarize the book for them (Ethan could promise that Animal Farm wasn't a story about a happy farmer who raised animals), and even asking the LLM how sex worked.
"Hey, check this out," Hancock said. Ethan looked up and saw Hancock with a holo-tape, which he set down in front of Ethan.
Ethan inserted the tape into the terminal and listened.
"This is not good! After Ellen killed Elise, that set off a bunch of the others, and it's turned into a bloodbath out there! The fight in the common room spilled out into where we keep the generators, and we just lost power. It's dark and I'm pretty sure the LLM is down. I would bet that its database got purged too, because the thing didn't have surge protection. I didn't think we'd need it.
I don't know what to do! I can't ask the LLM for advice or what I should do! Please, I need it to come back and tell me how to fix this!
I didn't even sign up for this. I'm only the Overseer because the LLM said to elect me."
"No wonder things went to shit," Hancock mused sadly. "They were so reliant on that thing that it got to the point where they couldn't even take care of themselves anymore without that thing tellin' 'em what to do."
"Even as it gave them blatantly wrong or outright dangerous information," Ethan agreed, turning off the terminal and standing up. Best to search the office and see if the Overseer kept anything useful. Even a bit of circuitry or duct tape would be helpful. The turrets around Sanctuary could always use spare parts.
"You could almost say that it hallucinated," Hancock snarked, already pocketing multiple stimpaks he found in the Overseer's private medicine cabinet. "And not in the fun way."
"I'd say that after a single generation, they just didn't know how to think critically anymore. I don't think they could even think for themselves anymore, and just parroted what their computers told them."
"They acted like it was a sentient thing, like what RobCo was makin', when really it's about as smart as the old pre-war TV sets. Hell, I'm pretty sure your Pip-boy was smarter than this LLM they were using."
"Well, let's just be glad that it was kept to this Vault. I think this kind of tech is the last thing the world outside needs."
The world may have ended much sooner had the LLM become widely used.