Flippanarchy

A few loose shits first though.

Gorgeous!

Find a few large trucks or tractors and fuck up their emissions systems: i.e. "rolling coal". Drive up to the air intakes and attach the exhausts to the air intakes.

Their CBRN filters will get destroyed in short order and then they're screwed.

so how do they get activated

Though Vault-Tec were not actually very good at their job. The small number of vaults we see in the games that were intended to work as advertised (whether as a control group or something else) all had something go wrong.

I don't think they'll care if they can make machines make them comfortable.

I also don't really believe the Mars thing. I'm just saying, science fiction has already laid the groundwork (and Fallout is just a video game, it's hardly the first medium to suggest this).

A better solution would be under the sea. If they can solve the pressure issue, they can build whole colonies right here on Earth, seal them up, and just drop them in the ocean. Then send submersibles down there. Maybe they can even have staged depth modules where you would descend so far, wait for a week to normalise pressure, then descend to the next level. Each module would have living quarters, medical facilities, all that. The reason I suggest under the sea is, it would be colder (you'd need energy to warm it up) and that would be great for the kinds of AI work they want to do.

Then again, if they just want the cold, they can also remove depth from the equation and set up in the Arctic. Like the northern parts of Canada... or Greenland, which the American president and his cronies are trying to seize (or buy? Not sure on that). Screw it, let them have the northern third, move all of them there, and leave the rest of the world alone.

A lot of things we have now would have been considered "silly sci-fi nonsense" not that long ago. I like that you bring up the best Fallout game, New Vegas. I personally preferred 3, but I loved NV for its writing and for not having an ugly green filter over everything. I recognise it was the better game, but I had more fun with its predecessor. Anyone who played adventure games in the 1980s or even the 1990s could not have imagined Fallout: New Vegas. I've been there for most of video games' history and... I mean, shit, look at some of the 8K Cyberpunk videos on YouTube. If they weren't all focused on car mods, I'd love to send some to some Boomers and say "believe it or not, this is a video game." I mean, they get rid of the HUD and everything, it almost looks real. The way the people look really gives it away.

Did Robert House even live that long? When we meet him in the game, he's just a computer. I think the Robo-Brains we saw in the Fallout 4 DLC Far Harbor had a better (more Fallout-cynical view) of longevity, that hotel full of rich peoples' brains in robots pretending they're real people. Head north from the main town and you'll be approached by one of them, it's a real hard quest to miss. It's not integral to the DLC's story, but I don't think it's missable (maybe if you shoot the robot on sight before it can give you the quest — but why would you do that when you could have a fade-to-black sex scene with one of the robots? I am not kidding). Anyway, I was referring to Nuka-World in Fallout 4, where they expressly state that Vault-Tec wants to put Vaults on other planets. Of course Vault-Tec lied to basically everybody, so they are not to be trusted, but if the control vaults (e.g. Vault 101 from Fallout 3) can really protect people from the Wastes (and, minor spoiler, even be opened and let people in and out!), they can probably protect people from space as well (or, I mean, a planet with no atmosphere). Of course, the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK) as presented in Fallout 3, that could potentially terraform a world, was dubious at best even in the games...

Well damn, in that case, if I were a billionaire who anticipated an apocalypse, I’d devote most of my resources to developing AI to handle that stuff.