This issue stays on rails without any surprising twists, but that’s fine.
A few more strands of plot are being tied together, more or less following their natural development, so this time we see the domino doing its thing and nothing more.
X-Zero: is a dialogue between Xavier and Forge. It mostly goes nowhere since it leads to a convoluted explanation that amounts to “it’s magic”. Essentially the scene’s purpose is to tell us that this new version of Cerebro that can store the mind & soul of all mutants was built by Forge. Who explains that such device would have two basic requirements: infinite power, and infinite data space (storage). Both of which have been already solved by Xavier through magic. Infinite power is an antimatter engine that was found nearby, and infinite data is some “Shi’Ar logical diamonds” that they also happen to already have.
I suppose Hickman didn’t invent anything here and just fished stuff out of the expansive Marvel universe, since it’s certainly not scarce of fancy tools. So the explanations is fairly bland, but it follows the “canon”, more or less. The idea is precisely coherent with all we’ve seen: it would be silly to not use all this power and resources lying about. A smart man (Xavier) would just do that.
This time we also get a couple of cases of “mystery for mystery’s sake”. Or, mystery without origin and consequence. The first is a mention in text that Xavier has already “reset” twice his mental state to a previous version. The reason is unknown, the effect is unknown.
X-Ten: is the recruitment of the White Queen. We already know all of this, so we just get to see it happen. The only tiny spark of interest is the second case of mystery for mystery’s sake. The mutandom has now a (temporary) government based on a oligarchy. Twelve in total. But we only have names for four of those. They are split in groups of three for each “season”. The group made by Xavier and Magneto then has a “dark” spot, and the same for White Queen + Black King. Whose hidden spot was something explicitly demanded by Emma Frost, and deliberately not revealed to the reader to build that mystery for mystery’s sake.
There’s even a completely pointless diagram to demand the reader be curious about this.
There’s also another scene for this section. This time Xavier visits Namor, but Namor doesn’t feel it’s the time to join the happy fun times, yet. This should be a teaser for later.
X-1000: a jump right to the end of the timeline. No one hundred year war this time. We get to see what I expected to see. The info-dump we get, about the situation with the Phalanx, is built a bit like a cliffhanger (again), but it was just a straightforward outcome. These futuristic humans tried to build some machinic alter-egos so that the Phalanx would be more hungry to absorb these “decoys”, while ignoring the organic forms and so keeping them alive. So this was their gamble to survive the amicable absorption. But turns out that this process of absorption also requires a lot of energy, to be performed, hence the Phalanx will consume the organic forms as well to use them as fuel.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It was a dumb plan.
The more interesting part is the text infodumps that might read like the hermetic principle “as above so below”, but that isn’t so much sophisticate here.
We are simply being told that there are more hierarchies past the Phalanx, and they continue exactly as before. They repeat endlessly like fractals, without any surprise or higher purpose. Hickman’s idea is that eventually a mind gets so dense it opens a black hole, disrupting space and time. But these black holes also get interlinked a build bigger societies, and they operate just the same of cells or living organisms, competing for food and dominance. The scale changes, but the behavior repeats.
So even the X-1000 is just about “humans” being stuck somewhere within this bottomless and topless process of “eat or be eaten”.
The concept is cute, but so what?