SENTINELS

Karima Shapandar was a detective with the Indian National Police in Kolkata, assigned to protect Neal Shaara while he searched for his missing brother Sanjit. In X-Men Unlimited Vol. 1 #27 (2000), by Chris Claremont and Brett Booth, the trail led to Bastion, who had already converted Sanjit into a Prime Sentinel and began the same process on Karima and Neal.

The procedure split the couple in opposite directions. On Neal, it forced his latent mutant power awake in a plasma eruption that wrecked the facility — he would become the X-Man Thunderbird. On Karima, it finished the job: nanotechnology rebuilt her from inside into an Omega Prime Sentinel, a human-sized Sentinel whose arms unfold into cannons and whose core programming orders her to destroy mutants on sight. Her transformed, weaponised body is plain to see in the gallery below.

Her first act as a Sentinel was to fight her own orders. Still able to think past the programming for a few moments, Karima told Neal she could feel herself starting to read him as a target rather than a person, and begged him to get as far from India — and from her — as he could. He fled; she stayed behind with the machine switched on inside her, until Professor Xavier and Magneto later disabled her Sentinel programming on Genosha and gave her back her own mind, though never her original body.