SENTINELS

Every Sentinel programme has a puppet-master, but only one of them was pulling the strings from inside the target list. After the Hellfire Club's clash with the X-Men played out in front of him, Sebastian Shaw — Black King of the Club, and secretly a mutant himself — went to his old friend Senator Robert Kelly with a sales pitch: the machines that hunt mutants were not a scandal, they were a national necessity. The pitch worked all the way to the President's desk, and the covert programme called Project: Wideawake handed Shaw Industries the contracts to build a new generation of Sentinels.

Shaw had studied the failures of the men before him. No Master Mold thinking for itself, no runaway intelligence giving orders: his Mark IV Sentinels were manufactured one by one in his factories, incapable of independent thought, and operated by remote control from afar. On paper it was the responsible design — the first Sentinel line engineered never to repeat the Trask family habit of turning on its makers.

In practice, Shaw protected one maker above all. As later chronicled in X-51 #4 (1999), he built a deliberate flaw into his machines: a Sentinel from his line could register mutant activity all around it, but there was one genetic signature it would never recognise as a mutant — Shaw's own. The deadliest mutant-hunting robots on the government payroll were, by design, incapable of seeing the mutant who had sold them.