MR. SINISTER

Outwardly, the facility at Alamogordo, New Mexico was nuclear research. In truth the Black Womb Project was a secret government programme cataloguing mutant children by the thousand — and one of its senior researchers, a mild obstetrician named Dr. Nathan Milbury, did not exist. The name was a coat Nathaniel Essex wore to work, as laid out across X-Men: Legacy Vol. 1 #211–214 (2008) by Mike Carey, letting Mister Sinister draw a government salary while he harvested the data his private experiments could never have reached.

Look at the staff roster and the project reads like a casting call for the next generation's traumas. The archivist was Irene Adler, the precognitive Destiny. The scientists included Kurt Marko, who would become stepfather to Charles Xavier and father to the Juggernaut, and Brian Xavier himself — recruited, like the others, less for his mind than for what Essex's files predicted his children would be. Sinister was not studying the mutants of his day; he was taking attendance for mutants who had not been born yet.

Alamogordo also housed his insurance policy: the Cronus device, built to pour Essex's mind and physical pattern into a prepared host if he ever truly died. The preparation was genealogical — he seeded his own DNA into Brian Xavier and Kurt Marko, so that their descendants would grow up as compatible vessels. Decades later, after his death in Messiah Complex, the device duly reached for Charles Xavier, and only Gambit's intervention — destroying the machine as the transfer took hold — kept the Professor from waking up as the project's director.