Charles Curling

Lt. Colonel Dr. Charles Curling was in command of the United States Chemical Corps during the events of Fallout 2. Stationed on the Enclave oil rig off San Francisco, it was Curling's job to implement the plan of then-President Richardson to reclaim the world. Charles Curling is also the one responsible for creation of Frank Horrigan.

The mission
As part of Richardson's plan to reclaim both the mainland United States as well as the rest of the world, Curling was tasked with finding a way to modify the Forced Evolutionary Virus into a targeted killing machine. Using samples mined from the Mariposa Military Base excavation, Curling set about editing the virus.

Aside from creating the virus, Curling and his staff worked on some FEV-infected subjects, including Frank Horrigan, an Enclave soldier who was stationed on Mariposa before he got infected. The modified FEV development was not the single result of these experiments, as Frank Horrigan was soon made into ultimate killing machine and Enclave's finest tool of warfare.

Curling's efforts were ultimately successful, giving rise to the Enclave's modified FEV strain. However, evil sprung from evil. The new virus was no longer a vehicle of mutation but rather a deadly form that was both airbone and possessed of high susceptibility. Released into the jet stream, the virus would be carried worldwide, striking down anybody unfortunate enough to contract it. According to plan, the virus was designed so that contracting it was a near-certainty. Curling's efforts were a success of such magnitude that he was explicitly mentioned in Richardson's State of the Nation address.

Naturally, the only way to employ such a weapon would be to have a safeguard against it. To that end, Curling and his team also perfected a vaccination against the modified FEV. Once the vaccine was distributed to Enclave forces, the eradication program was to be set in motion. At the time of the Chosen One aboard the oil rig, the Enclave was very close to completing that goal.

The Doctor's Conscience
Luckily, Lt. Col. Curling did have a conscience, somewhat dormant though it may have been. On some level, the idea of exterminating hundreds of thousands of very-near-humans didn't sit well with the doctor, and despite his dogged pursuit of his mission goals, he was not a zealous follower of Richardson's plans.

This presented the Chosen One with an option for averting global catastrophe. While Curling could be easily ignored - or almost as easily eliminated - a person possessed of good speech skills and enough charisma could cause Curling to rethink his mission and abandon the Enclave. Swayed by persuasive argument, Curling would choose to inoculate the Chosen One with the antivirus (as well as the Arroyo villagers and Vault 13 residents) and release the modified FEV into the oil rig's sealed environmental system instead of the outside world. While the virus would be filtered out by certain equipment such as power armor helmets, any non-military personnel would near-immediately succumb to the effects, creating a diversion for activating a countdown on a nuclear self-destruct to neutralize the virus threat (seeing that Sergeant Granite and his men were unaware that a self-destruct is in progress until the Chosen One informed him).

Legacy
In one way or another, Curling met his end on the oil rig during the final events of Fallout 2. Whether killed by the player's hand or when the rig exploded, Curling was removed from history and his efforts removed with him. With the rig's explosion, Curling's legacy of a deadly form of FEV was erased and never noted following the rig's destruction. As far as the dwellers of the wasteland were concerned, Curling never existed.

Behind the scenes

 * The poem Curling recites when conviced of the horrific nature of his actions is William Blake's Tiger.

Dr. Charles Curling