Big MT, also called Big Mountain or the Big Empty, is not a nation, tribe, or ordinary wasteland faction. It is a surviving scientific empire: a pre-war research machine that outlived the United States, the corporations that funded it, and the laws that once pretended to restrain it.
To outsiders, Big MT is a rumor wrapped in static. Caravan guards speak of vanished prospectors, floating eye-machines, lobotomized wanderers, metal insects, and weapons that leave men cooked inside their armor. Old military files describe it through redactions, missing pages, and black ink.
The truth is worse. Big MT was where America hid the future before the Great War: cybernetics, memory extraction, sonic weapons, force fields, weather manipulation, gene-splicing, robotics, artificial intelligence, automated surgery, and human experimentation. It was where science stopped asking if it should and started asking how quickly it could be weaponized.
In the post-war world, Big MT survives as a network of sealed labs, machine intelligences, robotic custodians, test subjects, and directives that never expired. Old projects did not die when the bombs fell. Some kept running. Some woke up. Some escaped. Some are still obeying systems that should have gone silent two centuries ago.
Somewhere in the frozen industrial ruins of Canada, the original creator of Big MT is believed to still exist.
Before the war, Big MT was built around one idea: no moral, legal, or biological boundary should stand between America and technological superiority. Its public face promised medicine, progress, defense, infrastructure, and a brighter tomorrow. Behind the fences, the work was monstrous.
Big MT absorbed military contracts, corporate prototypes, academic breakthroughs, stolen research, and unwilling human subjects. Its philosophy was simple: the body was a platform, the mind was software, the environment was a machine, and morality was a delay mechanism.
By the final years before the bombs, Big MT had grown beyond one facility. The Mojave crater was only the most infamous laboratory. Smaller branches, listening posts, weather stations, cryogenic bunkers, robotics yards, biomedical annexes, and resource-extraction sites were scattered across North America.
Canada became especially important. After annexation, the north offered distance from oversight, hostile terrain, mineral wealth, uranium deposits, frozen test ranges, and people whose protections had been stripped away by martial law. It was vast, quiet, and easy to lose people in.
The creator of Big MT is known in surviving files as the Director, Prime Architect, Founding Mind, Chief Systems Author, and, in one corrupted exchange, “the man who taught the mountain to think.” His true name is uncertain. Some records suggest he was an American defense scientist assigned to northern weapons development before annexation. Others claim he was a Canadian-born genius recruited, coerced, or captured during the takeover.
Whatever the truth, the creator did not vanish in the Great War. Fractured records claim he withdrew north before the bombs fell, relocating to a concealed Canadian continuity site beneath an old industrial and telecommunications complex. The site preserved command authority over remote Big MT assets if the continental grid collapsed. It held cryogenic chambers, mainframe stacks, neural interfaces, medical automats, and a classified uplink tied to research installations across the continent.
The facility’s true name has been lost or erased. Wastelanders call it the First Laboratory.
No one agrees on what became of the founder. Some say he is alive in cryogenic sleep, waking for minutes at a time to issue commands through dead satellites. Some say his brain was installed into a cold-room mainframe. Some say he copied himself too many times, and the things calling themselves the founder are only fragments arguing inside the walls. Some say he died before the bombs and the facility is obeying his last recorded instructions. The most disturbing theory is that all of these are true.
In Canada, Big MT is less like a normal faction and more like an old disease in the infrastructure. It thinks through buried processors and automated labs. It watches through weather towers, medical drones, and pre-war traffic cameras that should not still have power. It does not conquer openly. It experiments, collects, redirects, replaces, and waits.
Big MT does not operate like a military or settlement government. Its command structure is broken, layered, and unstable. The highest surviving authority is believed to be the Canadian Founder, or whatever remains of him. Beneath that are autonomous research directors, sealed department AIs, robotic custodians, machine personalities, and altered human agents.
A remote lab might gather spinal tissue because a 200-year-old directive says to. A medical bunker might “rescue” travelers only to catalogue their organs. A weather station might test atmospheric weapons on nearby towns because its computers still believe the war is days away.
Orders sound scientific rather than political. Big MT does not say, “Destroy the town.” It says, “Remove civilian interference from the active test region.” It does not say, “Kidnap subjects.” It says, “Acquire viable biological material.” Big MT studies the wasteland, reducing people to data, factions to variables, and communities to field conditions.
Its goals are simple and terrible: recover lost science, reclaim old prototypes, capture rare test subjects, restore broken command links, reopen sealed labs, and push the human form beyond its natural limits. Humans, ghouls, super mutants, intelligent creatures, mutated animals, and cybernetically altered survivors are all valuable. Rarity increases priority.
The Canadian Founder may be trying to reconnect the broken network by restoring satellite relays, recovering department AIs, and reactivating old wartime supply chains across the north. If that happens, Big MT would stop being scattered ruins and become something closer to a thinking continent-spanning laboratory.
Big MT rarely announces itself. Travelers may first encounter it through strange roadside signals, abandoned medical tents, preserved pre-war supply crates, or harmless-looking robots asking health questions. Settlements may suffer missing livestock, odd weather, repeating radio tones, sudden memory loss, unexplained sterility, or metal insects crawling out of storm drains.
Its Canadian branches are built for harsh terrain. Cold-weather robots, snow-buried sensor pylons, aurora-powered relay towers, ice-locked bunkers, and industrial mining labs allow Big MT to operate where ordinary factions struggle. In the north, a blizzard may be natural weather, or it may be a field test.
Big MT technology should feel brilliant, ugly, practical, and wrong: thick steel casings, warning labels, enamel paint, vacuum tubes, surgical arms, humming coils, exposed cables, analog dials, hazard lights, personality screens, and weapons that look as if a hospital machine and an artillery piece had a child.
Common assets include medical drones, cyberdogs, lobotomites, sentry robots, sonic emitters, force-field doors, stealth systems, auto-docs, memory extraction rigs, trauma harnesses, weather instruments, containment pods, and prototype energy weapons.
Its medical technology is dangerous because it works. Big MT can replace organs, repair nerves, preserve brains, graft machines to bone, and save people who should be dead. A patient is a chassis. A mind is recoverable data.
Most wastelanders do not know Big MT by name. They know the effects: the road where people come back wrong, the clinic that fixes blindness but takes memories as payment, the metal dogs that drag corpses into the snow, and the radio voice that gives medical advice during storms.
Among educated factions, Big MT inspires fear and greed. The Brotherhood sees it as a forbidden treasure vault and a technological plague. Raiders see its ruins as deathtraps full of valuable metal. Settlements see its machines as either miracles or curses.
Big MT’s greatest strength is that it does not need much living manpower. Robots do not desert. Mainframes do not sleep. Automated labs can run for centuries. It can strike with precision, vanish, and leave enemies unsure what they fought.
But Big MT is brilliant, not whole. Many systems are insane, literal-minded, damaged, or trapped in outdated orders. Its branches may work against each other without realizing it. A founder-fragment may issue orders that contradict another fragment’s plan.
Its arrogance is another weakness. Big MT sees wastelanders as contaminated primitives, then forgets that desperate people are inventive, stubborn, and good at breaking machines with tools that should not work. Cut the right cable or corrupt the right command archive, and a “godlike” facility can become a tomb full of confused robots and alarms.
Big MT works best as a hidden hand rather than a normal army. Its presence should feel like discovery, dread, and temptation. It offers miracles with hooks buried under the skin and creates problems that look like accidents until the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
A Big MT story can begin small: a missing caravan, a talking medical drone, a town cured of disease but stripped of emotion, a strange tower pulsing in the snow, or a weapon that whispers diagnostic advice to its owner. From there, the truth should widen.
The Canadian Founder should be treated as a distant, mythic presence. Do not reveal him too quickly. Let the wasteland speak of him in contradictions. Let terminals disagree. Let machines refer to him as alive, dead, sleeping, uploaded, divided, or returning.