CABLE

The most expendable soldier Cable ever commanded was Cable. At a weapons expo in Alexandria, the arms dealer Volga shot him with a stolen extra-dimensional serum — the same Volga Effect that granted brief super-powers before cooking its host from the inside. Cable hacked off his own arm with an ion blade trying to quarantine it. The strain was already in his metabolism, and his own prognosis gave the original Nathan Summers roughly a day before his body detonated.

So the original went into hiding the only way a dying man can: in stasis, under the care of Doctor Nemesis, while his memory engrams were copied onto a device called a thoughtlog and loaded into fresh clone bodies. Each copy woke up believing the mission was his, led X-Force in the field, and ran down the same 24-hour clock — a day of operations, then death, sometimes as a walking bomb. A clone could even trigger its own meltdown early by whistling, an audio failsafe built for kamikaze runs.

The arrangement stayed secret until X-Force Vol. 4 #6 (2014), when the team finally learned that the hard-eyed commander barking orders at them was a copy — and that the genuine Cable lay comatose in a tank, burning through replacements one day at a time. Hope Summers had meanwhile copied his powers and, with them, a psychic replica of the same instability, which meant the countdown was running in two bodies at once.