Sentinels

We are the Sentinels! Our brain is superior to your brain! Our strength is superior to your strength! We serve none! We are the Sentinels! It is our destiny to command!

—Sentinel 1^[src]

History

Origins[]

The Sentinels were artificially intelligent robots designed to hunt mutantkind. Although a prototype was developed in San Francisco in 1906, the modern Sentinels were first created by Dr. Bolivar Trask. His intention was to use them to save humanity from what he saw as an impending threat to the species' existence due to the increasing numbers of emerging mutants.

Trask created a Master Mold as the "chief" Sentinel unit, an A.I. capable of independently creating Sentinels.^[3]

While Bolivar Trask invented the Sentinels, the many lives of Moira MacTaggert have shown that A.I. such as the Sentinels inevitably emerge at a certain point in humanity's environmental and societal evolution, regardless of whom their actual inventor is.^[4]

Early Sentinels[]

During a televised debate between Trask and mutant advocate Professor Charles Xavier, Trask publicly unveiled and activated the Sentinels. Trask had underestimated the Sentinels' capacity for individual thought, however. Master Mold had run countless simulations until coming to the conclusion that the only way to save humanity was to save it from itself, which the Sentinels would accomplish by ruling over mankind themselves. In order to achieve this, the Sentinels kidnapped Trask. The Sentinel base was invaded by the mutant heroes known as the X-Men. Upon realizing how far his creations were willing to go, Trask helped the X-Men destroy the base, destroying Master Mold and the Sentinels in the process.

Unaware of the details surrounding his father's death, Bolivar's son Larry Trask resurrected the Sentinel program, believing that his father had been killed by the X-Men. After years of work, Larry unveiled the Mark II Sentinels, improvements over the originals in nearly every way. However, the Mark II Sentinels' weakness was their blind dependency on cold logic. This allowed X-Man Cyclops to convince the Sentinels to fly into the Sun, arguing that destroying the Sun was necessary to completely prevent future mutation.^[5]

After Larry Trask's eventual death, material pertaining to the Sentinel program fell into the hands of the U.S. government. They relaunched the Sentinel program as "Project Armageddon" under the leadership of Steven Lang, who created the Mark III Sentinels, some of which were the so-called "X-Sentinels", Sentinels made to mimic the original X-Men. Hoping to avoid potential rebellions from the Sentinels, Lang made them less intelligent than the previous models. While Lang rebuilt the original Master Mold, he opted not to use it. Since Lang was working from incomplete notes, the Mark III Sentinels were generally weaker than their predecessors. The Mark III Sentinels met their end when the space station where they were housed was destroyed by the X-Men.^[6]

The most long-lived Sentinel project was that of Project: Wideawake, a government agency led by Henry Gyrich and Valerie Cooper that purchased Sentinels from Sebastian Shaw, the Black King of the Hellfire Club. Project: Wideawake also had its own research and development division, based at Camp Hayden, which made an attempt to recreate the future Sentinel known as Nimrod and to use this technology to improve their purchased Sentinels. Despite being a mutant himself, Shaw would oversee the creation of three generations of Sentinels, Marks IV-VI. Shaw profited from the Sentinels, and used them to target his enemies. Like the Mark III:s, Shaw's Sentinels were never as powerful as the first two iterations created by Bolivar and Larry Trask. Shaw also worked on the Mark VII Sentinels, though only produced a prototype.

Nano & Wild Sentinels[]

The original Master Mold survived the attempts to destroy it and managed to merge with the future Sentinel known as Nimrod. After being forced through the Siege Perilous, the two emerged as a new being: Bastion. Bastion began experimenting with Sentinel technology, leading to the creation of "Omega Sentinels", humans infected with Nano-Sentinels and converted into machine/human hybrids.

Nano-Sentinels would represent a massive leap in Sentinel-technology.

Cassandra Nova, the Mummudrai of Charles Xavier, discovered an abandoned Sentinel facility in Ecuador. The facility had been built by the U.S. government with the intent of creating evolving, self-duplicating Sentinels. These Sentinels scavenged any nearby technology and material to grow. Still keyed to Trask DNA, Nova used a nephew of Bolivar Trask to allow her to assume command of the Wild Sentinels, and used them to destroy the mutant nation of Genosha, killing millions of mutants.^[7]

The Wild Sentinel responsible for the genocide would be granted a consciousness by the Shi'ar A.I. Danger. Upon realizing what it had done on Genosha, the Wild Sentinel left Earth. It would later return in an attempt to save the planet, and was destroyed in the attempt.

Following M-Day, the O.N.E. made use of giant, non-A.I. Sentinels with human pilots. The O.N.E. would also develop Mark VIII Sentinels.

Modern Sentinels[]

After assuming control of the Hellfire Club and dedicating himself to fighting the Jean Grey School, Kade Kilgore had his associates begin work on a new generation of Sentinels. They created several Sentinel models, from Mark X-XIII.

Around the same time, Dark Beast used S.H.I.E.L.D. files to create his own fleet of highly advanced Sentinels, which he used to target the X-Men. The Red Skull would use Stark technology to create his own Sentinels, designed to target various superhuman heroes in general, rather than mutants in particular.

Months later as the world was reeling from a crisis caused by the incursions, some Sentinels were reprogrammed to serve Nation X, a nascent mutant nation based in the Canadian wilds.

Orchis[]

Following the establishment of the mutant nation of Krakoa, the mutant-phobic organization Orchis reached a new pinnacle of Sentinel technology. Using Sol's Hammer as a base, they created a Mother Mold, a replicating, adaptive, self-aware Sentinel factory capable of creating Master Molds. While a Master Mold is incapable of improving beyond its ultimate Sentinel state, the Mother Mold is believed to be able to produce purely adaptable machines through Nano-Sentinel technology.^[4]

Identifying this as an existential threat, Krakoa launched a strike team to destroy the Mother Mold, fearful that its invention would lead to the creation of a Nimrod-unit. While the mutants succeeded, they failed in preventing the creation of Nimrod, a pure Nano-Sentinel construct made to be adaptive, self-aware and self-replicating.

While ostensibly serving humanity against mutantkind, Nimrod and his associate Omega Sentinel (inhabited by her evil alternate future self) hated humans as much as mutants, hiding their true intentions while biding their time.^[8] Using technology from Omega Sentinel's future, the A.I. segments of Orchis planned to summon a Dominion, a godlike A.I. that would absorb them into itself, allowing them to exist forever outside of time.^[9]