The X-Men’s time-traveling mutant soldier Cable has never shied away from making the tough choices in difficult situations. Under his guidance, the New Mutants became more militarized and proactive in the team known as X-Force.
There have been multiple iterations of X-Force over the years, each with a reputation for getting its hands dirty. They’re willing to do things that the other X-Men won’t consider. It is a reality that comes, in no small part, from Cable’s influence on the team. But one version of X-Force, led by Cable, was particularly nasty.
Simon Spurrier’s X-Force series, published in 2014, saw Cable assemble a team of mutants to go on secret missions in the name of protecting mutantkind. He chose mutants such as Betsy Braddock, Fantomex, and Marrow. The members relished violence and possessed morals laxer than most of the X-Men. This X-Force team carried out extremely grim missions involving murder, torture, and terrorism and typically came with significant collateral damage.
Gradually these missions became more and more morally reprehensible until the other members of X-Force began to question Cable’s orders. Although they were willing to loosen their morals for the greater good, the sheer scale of violence and surveillance began to seem impossible to justify. They felt that Cable was behaving more callous and ruthless than he had in the past. They turned out to be correct as a physical condition impaired Cable’s judgment: excessive cloning.
X-Force #6 (by Simon Spurrier, Jorge Molina, Craig Yeung, Rachelle Rosenberg, and VC’s Cory Petit) reveals that before he reassembled X-Force, an injection of super-soldier formula had made him into a human bomb. Cable circumvented this by putting his body in stasis and creating a new clone of himself every morning. This clone would carry out the day’s mission and then commit suicide before his explosion at the end of the day. The process would begin the next day anew, with the new Cable clone receiving the previous clones’ memories telepathically. Doctor Nemesis assisted Cable in creating these clones while researching a way to safely cure Cable’s main body.
Although this cloning process enabled Cable to continue his mission of using X-Force to protect mutantkind, it had a detrimental effect on his brain. The telepathic process used to pass his memories from clone to clone was imperfect. It influenced him to behave in a detached, emotionless way. Furthermore, after Cable’s main body was finally cured, Doctor Nemesis speculated that the clones’ moral judgment gradually degraded with each clone created. Thus, the later Cable clones were making decisions that the original Cable likely would not have made. They were crueler and more ruthless than he would have been.
The members of X-Force did a lot of things they regretted, all because they were following orders from a man mentally unfit for leadership. Cable may not have been entirely to blame for the actions of his clones. Nonetheless, he still has to cope with the knowledge that he was partially responsible for countless acts of impossible to justify violence.
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