From when it first closed after the bombs fell, the vault door is on a timer of 60 years before it can be opened. However, at any point, if any resident wishes for it, they can go to one of the terminals or use their Pip-Boy to reset the timer back to 60 years. The identity of the resetter is anonymous.

The idea is that opening the door should require the vault inhabitants (of which there're 3600) to reach a consensus. A single dissenting voice can ruin everything for everybody.

Imagine growing up between four walls. Imagine being raised beneath the earth, buried like your ancestors two centuries ago. Imagine having nothing but the stories they've been telling you since the day of your birth: That only the Vault is safe. That the world above is hell. And that one day, your kind will rise, step into the ruins, and rebuild it all.

Then one day, for whatever reason, you leave your vault behind. You see the sun for the first time, see the vast corpse of America waiting. They've taught you all about it before, the desert, the radiation, the sickness.

Yet you are young, watching a terrifying freedom stare right back at you. You take a step forward.

There is a man with a name you recognise from the history books they forced you to read in class. He speaks of carrying the "torch of civilization" into this tribal, backward wasteland.

You’ve never seen Arizona before, but you've been told it's a savage place. You've been told everywhere is savage.

You are young, and the wasteland is cold. There are men in red dreaming of building a grand nation and you dream with them. You will bring order to this "hellish" desert. You will rebuild it. Just as they taught you to.

You join. And the people are strange. Boys all around your age chant in a dead tongue to dead gods of a long gone empire. You wear their red, but you are not quite like them, not with your well-nourished body accustomed to stimpacks and soft mattresses. Childhood memories of weekly movie nights, yellow-blue overalls, jazz music, algebra and father shooing you out of the cigar lounge keep haunting your nights.

You are not quite like them but you go on. You are young and the Bull welcomes you for now. You go on. The Caesar orders and you kill, you pillage, you torture in his name. You are cruel because you have to be or maybe you've always this way. Maybe something was different inside you from the start. Maybe you've always been so messed up.

Somewhere, in a shadowy corner of your mind that you dare not linger too much you wonder if all of this is right. Maybe you made the wrong choice the moment you saw the sun maybe you shouldn't have left your vault. But its too late now, this is your life and you can never go back home.

You are still young yet your hair has specks of grey showing in the reflection. The world has not been kind and neither has the Legion.

Yet you are young and the wasteland is cold and the torch burns bright and red is the only colour you can remember now.

Fallout New Vegas Vaults- Vault 11