Children of the Vault #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
CHILDREN OF THE VAULT #3
“War on Tomorrow”
Writer: Deniz Camp
Artist: Luca Maresca
Colourist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1. Bishop and Cable (with their big guns) in the foreground, with the Children floating over their City in the background.
PAGES 2-6. Bishop and Cable attack the City.
Last issue, Bishop and Cable captured Martillo and Cable obtained “access codes, layouts, City defence protocols” and so forth from him. This is them acting on that plan. The basic idea is to fire a “micro-singularity” at the City, simply as a distraction to leave the Children open to Orchis. We’ll see in the next scene how Cable and Bishop got Orchis to attack.
Most of the Children are just defending themselves here, but Capitán is singled out as the one who really looks down on the mutants. The previous issue established that he was the leader of the losing “Traditionalist” faction that argued for just wiping out humanity and starting over with the Children; the whole idea of posing as superheroes and assimilating (some of) the humans is a comparatively liberal plan pushed by Serafina.
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGES 8-9. Flashback: Orchis are manipulated into attacking the Children.
The Reforge. Described as a “rebuilt Orchis Photospheric Headquarters”, this is apparently an updated version of the Orchis Forge space station, still with the giant Sentinel head in the centre, but apparently now on the actual surface of the sun. I don’t recall anything in particular happening to cause the Forge to be rebuilt, though.
Anyway: Orchis haven’t been attacking the Children up to now, because they’ve been affected by the Children’s mind virus just like anyone else. Cable has (somehow) managed to sneak aboard the base – or affect it remotely – and draw the attention of a mid-level scientist to what’s going on. Orchis have responded by handing everything over to AIs that the Children can’t affect. This results in the AI despatching not just the Stark Sentinels but a bunch of traditional Sentienls too.
The narrator tells us that the Sentinels are being controlled by “untouched A.I.s trained on ten million years’ worth of intergalactic war scholarship.” That’s an odd comment given that Orchis is basically a human organisation – where did they get hold of something like that? Is it just some random bit of alien tech, or is there more to it?
PAGE 10. Capitán tells Serafina that she’s “lost the argument”.
Capitán sees this as vindication of his “Traditionalist” stance. He tried being nice to the humans, and look what happened.
Serafina is puzzled – not just because the mind virus didn’t work, but also because something is blocking her attempts to control the Sentinels with her powers. Serafina will get back to this point on page 15.
PAGES 11-13. Cable and Bishop squabble about their favourite guns.
Comedy interlude! I don’t think we’ve heard of the Beyonder / Phoenix was of the 43rd century before, but it doesn’t sound like anything we should be worrying about. These must be excellent guns if they were of any use in a fight between those two, though.
The unnamed sword guy seems to be new.
“The Order of the Fallen Bishop” also seems to be new, but it would presumably be something that Cable set up during the 2008-2010 Cable series where Bishop was pursuing Cable through time. If this bunch was active from the 26th to 28th centuries, then that’s hard to place exactly since Cable generally avoided giving exact years, but they were probably set up somewhere in the region of Cable #6.
PAGE 14. Data page: a letter from Cable to Hope, apparently in the form of a thought broadcast which is “intercepted” by someone or other.
“Once, we ran from roaches the size of men.” In Cable #8-10.
“The whole timeline is in upheaval – note as it should be. Something has made a mess of time.” Cable is citing this as an explanation of why his knowledge of the future is unreliable. But Destiny has been saying something similar in Immortal X-Men ever since “Sins of Sinister”. Destiny seems to credit the instability to the defeat of Mr Sinister’s plan to control the future by using Moira clones to keep rebooting reality whenever it doesn’t go his way; this opened up a range of new possibilities.
It’s also worth recalling here that in X-Men #24, we saw the young Cable attack Orchis and try to thwart the Hellfire Gala. So there are two Cables running around in the present at the moment, but we don’t know yet what’s become of the younger one. Presumably he’s still an Orchis prisoner.
PAGES 15-17. Serafina expands her mind to understand what’s happening.
Her positioning compared to Capitán, and what she discovers in this scene, seems to leave her primed for a face turn. She identifies the Orchis A.I. as “a nascent war mind, an ancient precursor to our City.” She recalls meeting Cable before (in the “Supernovas” arc from X-Men #188-193).
More to the point, though, she detects a Dominion exerting influence behind the scenes – which is a much more central plotline for the X-books than anything so far in this book. The Dominion concept dates from Powers of X, where it was a collective society that had developed into something outside time and space. In Immortal X-Men, the focus has been on which of the four Nathaniel Essex clones (Mr Sinister, Dr Stasis, Orbis Stellaris and Mother Righteous) will personally ascend to Dominion-hood.
The fact that Dominions operate outside normal time may explain why this series is using time travellers Cable and Bishop as its protagonists, and why the preceding data page was stressing Cable’s unusual perception of the mutability of time.
PAGES 18-19. Orchis struggles to counteract the Children’s Message.
This is an odd scene. Orchis are often shown as manipulating the narrative and such like, but this scene involves mass rebellion against Orchis for having the temerity to criticise the Children. That… seems like the sort of thing that ought to be a big deal in other books. Maybe it will be?
PAGE 20. Data page. Bishop’s diary.
“For weeks after gala heard Xavier screaming ‘go to gate'”. After-effects of Professor X ordering everyone through the gates in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. Sunspot reported something similar in X-Men Red.
“What is, is.” Askani mantra heavily used back in the days when Jeph Loeb was writing Cable.
The Nega-Bomb was a genocidal weapon used at the end of the Kree-Skrull War, in the 1992 Avengers crossover “Operation: Galactic Storm”.
The Psimitar was Cable’s signature weapon while Joe Casey was writing his book.
“How could you ever go far enough?” This series has been explicitly reminding us of Bishop’s acts of mass destruction in the 2008-2010 Cable mini, and this page tells us that Cable has given him access to weapons of mass destruction – one of which, apparently, he has pocketed. This is not encouraging.
PAGES 21-22. Bishop enters the City and fights Madre.
PAGES 23-24. Serafina tries to warn the City about the Dominion.
Serafina says that the humans are “not even in control” and that the Dominion “wears them like a glove” – this seems to suggest that the Dominion is acting through the A.I. that is now controlling Orchis’s systems. Cable brought that result about, but he doesn’t seem to recognise what Serafina is talking about.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads KILL THE FUTURE.
I know it is Cable’s gimmick but those proportions on the cover are very silly looking.
I assume the “dominion” is the original Essex it almost has to be at this point, doesn’t it?
This Dominion is the original one we learned about from Hickman’s run, which is sufficiently advanced AI that caused a collapse in reality becoming a Singularity. The one that has the Phalanx assimilating all material life for it. It’s what Essex was warning about.
There is a different Dominion related to the Essexes, which would be opposed to machine supremacy.
As far as the AI controlling the Sentinels, Omega Sentinel is from an alternate future Earth-616. In that timeline, the Children of the Vault attempted to conquer the world but were defeated by an alliance of humanity and mutants. So, if the Children have actually taken control of technology for their own benefit (as the post-humans in Moira’s Life Six mistakenly believed they had accomplished), that would mean that the Children’s City AI might have been left untouched after the Children were defeated. Perhaps, Omega Sentinel liberated this AI from the City, bringing it with her from the alternate Life Ten future. That could explain the “ten million years”, as evolution is sped up in the Children’s City. If the City AI was left for all those years between the defeat of the Children and the dystopian future, it could have progressed the equivalent of ten million years.
@Asteele, Chris V- I don’t think that the Dominion is the original Essex. And I don’t think that the Dominion is the original one that the Phalanx serve. either. I think that the Dominion is Xavier. We saw in the last issue of Immortal X-Men Xavier was in Sinister’s lab and his Sinister personality seemed to be emerging. And in this week’s issue of Iron Man, we see Xavier watching Tony and Tony says that he didn’t realize how much danger he was in until much later. If the Dominion is Xavier, then it could be using Orchis to ensure that Xavier becomes the Dominion. And it would explain why Mother Righteous said that the Dominion absorbed Legion in the Sins of Sinister timeline. Plus, we know that Storm is going to try to resurrect Magneto to stop Orchis- that would make sense if their patron, unknown to them, is Xavier.
I don’t think Serafina just meant that the Dominion was manipulating Orchis though the AI, either. If the Dominion was Xavier then manipulation people’s minds would seem natural to it.
Moreover, there have been a number of scenes with Orchis that make sense if something else was pulling Orchis’s strings. Omega Sentinel claimed to have been sent back in time by a “trickster Titan”- that could have been the Sinister Dominion, unbeknownst to her. Orchis was somehow able to travel to both Blightspoke and Limbo- we assumed that Clan Akkaba was involved but that could have been the Dominion. Nobody knew how Krol and Vallens in Dark X-Men came to be hired by Orchis- we assumed there was some magical reason but it could have been the Dominion. Even the AIs with intergalactic war scholarship in this issue- that could have been the Dominion’s work.
“That… seems like the sort of thing that ought to be a big deal in other books. Maybe it will be?”
I think that this is a temporary thing triggered by the Message and will probably stop once the Message is defeated.
Brief note, the golden-skinned guy Bishop is fighting is Muerte (death), not Madre (mother). Madre is presumably the bald person responsible for decanting Children.
I’m enjoying this more than I should, if only for the Morrison-esque style of throwing big concepts and unexplained references against the wall twice a page.
No. I’m sure there are two different Dominions now.
The idea of a Sinisterized Xavier being the Dominion that stopped Sinister at the end of SoS is actually a good idea. I never considered that. That could be true.
The Dominion in SoS which absorbed Legion was the same Dominion that stopped Sinister, not the “machine god”.
I believe the Dominion behind Orchis is the “machine god” introduced by Hickman. Nimrod and Omega Sentinel’s end game is to achieve Ascension.
There is a cosmic was going on between the different Dominions.
I’ve heard speculation that the “trickster Titan” was the evolution of a merged Warlock/Krakoa, and I think that makes sense as Hickman’s original plan.
*cosmic war, not was
Nitpick alert: “Operation: Galactic Storm” involved the Kree-Shi’ar War. I believe the Nega-Bomb was used by the Supreme Intelligence on the Kree for whatever passed for reasons in a 90s crossover.
The Nega-Bomb wiped out the majority of the Kree population because the Supreme Intelligence realized that the Kree which survived would have the possibility to evolve. It was a long-running plot that the Kree were an evolutionary deadend. The Supreme Intelligence was attempting to find a solution and figured out this would be the only way to solve the problem.
ChrisV: Honestly, given all the time travel shenanigans, I really like the phrase “cosmic was”
MasterMahan: “Morrison-esque: fits, but the vibe I was getting from much of this issue was 1970s Jack Kirby. Just hurling out ideas and exclamation points in equal profusion!
Michael: Interesting theory about a Xavier-Dominion. I’ve noted for a while now that, while it was *implied* that one of the Sinisters ascended, no one in the story ever explicitly made that claim. That sort of story structure, especially from a structuralist like Gillen, almost guarantees that the implied plot point is a fake-out.
The Dominion is quite the puzzle, and may have always been meant to be. That is probably the point.
If we attempt to seriously consider what is known about it and the logical implications while also keeping track of the inescapable fact that we are following serial fiction… I guess the first realization is that there is no hope of understanding what it is nor what it wants. It exists outside our time, it is a superevolved hivemind supposedly of well over galactical proportions that some people somehow expect to identify with a singular person or another.
Those are not humanly understandable notions, let alone predictable. If humans can even perceive a Dominion at all, it stands to reason that it will be under whatever restrictions and filters that the Dominion itself (or something else of a comparable level of transcendence) sees fit to. It may be utterly indetectable and inconceivable of for a given person, it may speak through someone else’s parrot every day just because, it may be the true face of Niagara Falls, Stan Lee and Megashark all at once, it may be who I had lunch with ten seconds ago and also the letter that exists between “M” and “N” and the color that occupies the space between “car horn” and “swarm of bees”.
There’s a number of parallels between this book and the Children of Tomorrow from Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates. Serafina’s group use the CoT name when they masquerade as a superhero team in issue 1. The Vault is expanding rapidly across South America through the Tomorrowtowns, just as the Dome once expanded rapidly across Europe. Madre revives Muerte-13 as a weapon of last resort just as the Maker once freed Death as a trump card. In UCU, the Maker sends Death to the US Congress, which Death blows up, killing the President and most of the government. You can’t do that to the main universe, but I wonder if Muerte is being sent to the Orchis Reforge?
Ironically, Hickman created the Children of Tomorrow for the UU by combining the Exiles of Central City from Fantastic Four and the Children of the Vault from X-Men.
The huge singularity gun our heroes use on the CotV is the same one that Forge built in X-Men 15 to use on the Vault. (That was a “simulation” but it appears Forge built it for real.) In that issue, Cyclops said Cable would love to have that gun, so there’s a nice callback here.
Something else interesting is that in the Carey and Hickman takes on the CotV, there were 3000 Children in total (600 pods of 5 Children each), with Hickman establishing that the Vault practices strict population control. Yet in the Duggan and Camp takes on the CotV, there are close to 1 million Children in the Vault. This is not necessarily a contradiction (the Vault could have evolved post-Darwin), but it’s interesting to note.
Paul > I don’t recall anything in particular happening to cause the Forge to be rebuilt, though.
A second version of the Mother Mold was under construction and being fitted into the Orchis Forge in Inferno 3. (The first Mother Mold was launched into the Sun by the X-Men in House of X.) Over in Inferno 2, Orchis was working on harnessing the Sun’s power into destructive blasts, which is likely a precursor to the Sol Hammerstrikes the Mother Mold rains on the Vault here.
Paul > The narrator tells us that the Sentinels are being controlled by “untouched A.I.s trained on ten million years’ worth of intergalactic war scholarship.”
It’s possible that this is related to Nimrod. In b>Inferno, Omega Sentinel infers that Nimrod “grew up” so quickly by running countless simulations in parallel. So maybe these A.I.s (created by Nimrod?) were trained the same way.
Paul > That… seems like the sort of thing that ought to be a big deal in other books. Maybe it will be?
I believe it might. It seems to me that (excluding the nostalgia books) most of the DoX/FoX miniseries launched by non-X-Slack writers are meant to further develop subplots from the main books.
Rogue & Gambit was a spinoff of the Rogue/Destiny subplot from X-Men Year 1 and sets up Manifold for X-Men.
Children of the Vault is a spinoff of the CotV subplot from X-Men Year 2 and seems to set up a Vault invasion for X-Men.
Jean Grey is a spinoff of the Phoenix subplot from X-Men Year 1+2 and sets up the White Hot Room for Immortal X-Men.
The societal conflict presented here is between Serafina’s assimilationist approach and Capitán’s expansionist approach. Basically the traditional Professor X / Magneto conflict. This miniseries is exploring Serafina’s plan in action, but I suspect it’s going to end with the Message failing, and the Vault pivoting to Capitán’s plan of global invasion.
Cue an X-Men vs CotV storyline. Synch and Talon need a rematch with the Vault in order to get closure and Duggan set up the hyperevolved code Darwin, who I’m sure will come back in a significant way.
MasterMahan > Brief note, the golden-skinned guy Bishop is fighting is Muerte (death), not Madre (mother). Madre is presumably the bald person responsible for decanting Children.
It’s the other way around. The gold-skinned Child is Madre, the keeper of the Crèche. We’ve seen them in this role before in Hickman’s X-Men 19. The bald dwarf Child is Muerte, who Madre is assigning some apocalyptic task to.
GN — the CoTV and the Ultimate CoT are the versions of the same group without ambiguity. the City AI is the same character design as the Vault AI. The City’s big mushroom thing from Ultimates is drawn inside the Vault during Hickman’s run. The CoTV are called the CoT.
Luis Dantas: Although the Dominion is theoretically outside time and hyperintelligent — it’s being written in linear, serialized time by a merely-mortal writer, and will be experiences by its reading audience likewise. All of which makes it hard to portray such a being.
That said, I really like your poetic approach to it, and wouldn’t be disappointed if the X-authors do something along those lines!
On page 11, when our duo are arguing about which gun rules hardest, Bishop’s choice is the “P832 Zero-Point Plasma Canon”. It’s written that way – “Canon”, with one “n”. Is that just a typo, or is the name of the future weapon related to “canons of law”, or a set of accepted exemplars (“literary canon”), or the musical form we usually associate with Pachelbel? Usually I’d just think typo, but with this book’s explicit playing with semantic warfare, I could be convinced otherwise.
Another point worth considering (though I seriously doubt even Hickman gave it that much thought) is that if Dominions are beyond time and space, then every Dominion the mutants destroyed during 10A should still be dead and gone in the “present” of 10B. If once a Dominion exists it has always existed, then once it’s gone it’s never been, no?
Didn’t Sins if Sinister imply only one dominion per universe since they are outside time? Thanks why Mother righteous lost, there already was one. I don’t think there can be two.
No, the “Red Dominion” at the end of SoS is suggested to just be the one most local/closest to Earth’s sector of space. If there was only one Dominion per universe Omega’s original future wouldn’t make sense