MR. SINISTER

Krakoa’s greatest schemer did not just plan for failure — he industrialised it. In Immortal X-Men #1 (2022), by Kieron Gillen and Lucas Werneck, the final page reveals Mister Sinister’s private laboratory secret: rows of clones of Moira MacTaggert, grown from her DNA and wired to a digital interface that continuously uploads the world’s recent history into their minds. Moira’s mutant gift restarts existence itself when she dies — and Sinister had turned that cosmic reset into office equipment.

The mechanism works like a game with save slots. Each clone’s cellular age is engineered so that, when Sinister kills her, time rewinds to the moment of that clone’s creation — no further, no shorter. He picks how far back to jump by picking which Moira to kill, and because the murdered clone carried the uploaded record of the abandoned timeline, the restarted Sinister wakes up knowing everything that went wrong last time. Marvel’s own account puts his total at 26 resets — 26 discarded histories spent rehearsing, among other things, how to survive a god’s judgement in A.X.E.: Judgment Day.

The device — later named the Moira Engine — became the engine of his endgame in Sins of Sinister (2023): assassinating the Quiet Council again and again across resets until the attempt finally succeeded, then corrupting Krakoa’s resurrection system so the reborn came back carrying his diamond and his will. It nearly made him a Dominion, a being outside time. It also contained the flaw he never engineered out: an engine built from a person can be stolen, sabotaged — or walked off with by the original Moira.