It was not a perfect solution.
Killing Cable every day allowed Fantomex to maintain his tenuous grasp on the reality of his own existence, but he could not keep it up forever. Eventually, somebody was bound to notice that he was absent whenever one of their leader's clones expired. It would raise questions. Answers would be expected. Answers which might make the rest of the team... uncomfortable.
Or perhaps not. They were a group of mal-adjusted caffeine-addicted mutant killers, after all.
But even if nobody noticed that Fantomex killed Cable each time the clone finished recording its thoughtlog, this finely balanced status-quo was by no means permanent. Eventually, Doc Nemesis would find a cure, and Cable would be brought out of stasis. No more clones to kill. Or, and this was looking infinitely more likely, no cure would be found and Cable's original body (if that term was even an accurate description of the man) would violently expire. Again. It seemed like Cable was dying every other day, but he always seemed to find a way around death. Some sort of loophole, perhaps.
In any case, Fantomex would, at some point in the not too distant future, find himself up the proverbial creek without a hypothetical paddle. And he had no idea what to do about it.
Oh, he knew what he would do about it. Kill them all, one by one. Doc Nemesis would be first. Fantomex would make it look like Marrow had done it. There was no love lost between the two. It was a plausible outcome.
Marrow herself would be next. It wouldn't be easy, because she had a wicked healing factor that matched, if not surpassed his own (zut alors!) and she was capable of protecting herself from attack by growing her bones freakishly out of her skin and using them as an external carapace. Of course, there were ways around that. First you had to get close. Then you struck for the heart.
Betsy would have to go next. Ironic, considering he'd once died to save her life. But that was before he'd become mentally unhinged. Back in the good old days when your boss didn't explode every day (except that one time when Archangel had become the new Apocalypse, but that didn't really count because Warren had been a time-bomb right from the start). Elizabeth would not be an easy kill, but he had the edge here. He could read her. She could not read him. A small act of misdirection was all he'd need. She would never see him coming.
MeMe would be the hardest to kill, practically speaking. How did one kill something which could exist as data? No heart to aim for. No artery to slice. No throat to crush. Yes, MeMe would be a challenge, but he was fairly certain that if he killed her body, destroyed her holo-platforms and torched the helicarrier, he would end any threat she might pose in the future.
She interrupted his thoughts by appearing beside him, her holographic face suspicious, as if she'd heard his macabre musings. But that wasn't possible. The ceramic plates in his mask protected his mind from telepathic intrusion, and though she could interact with the sentinel nanotech which was fused to the cells of his body, he suspected he'd feel it if she tried, like he'd felt it when she'd pulled him into the datascape the other day.
"lookhereLOOK," she said, calling up a string of data on the monitor in front of him. It was incomprehensible gibberish, but he couldn't rightly admit it; his own self-superiority would not allow it. So he merely nodded, and waited for her to elaborate. "VOLGAtrail. olddays but could follow-try. maybe somewherelead?"
"Good idea," he said, for want of something more encouraging.
She stared at him, her holographic eyes empty. Almost dead. But not quite. Not yet...
"QUERY whyHERE areyou?"
"The same reason any of us are here," he said, affecting a casual shrug. "To protect mutant-kind from any threat which might arise."
"YESno. protectmutantsGOOD YES. don'tbelieve you, but not what ASKINGmeant. whyHERE areyou now? NOW. HERE."
"Ah." He considered how to respond. Strange as it seemed, he felt at ease around MeMe. She was a girl who'd led a life as a digital slave, created by a man who wanted to use her as a weapon. Her origins echoed his own in many ways, but it was more than that. MeMe, he suspected, was the only one on the team who understood him.
Not completely understood him, of course, because he was, by his very nature, elusive, enigmatic, and inherently un-understandable. But everybody needed to be understood just a little bit. Even men who'd been cobbled together out of sentinel nanobots and mutant DNA by mad Frankenscientists looking to create weapons to hunt down mutants. Even if it meant being understood by nonsense-speaking digital girls who could touch you in strange and mind-blowing ways.
"To tell you the truth, I wanted to do something to try and take my mind off my monumental problems."
"WORKED has it?"
"Not particularly," he admitted. "It's harder than I thought to leave problems behind. I seem to carry them around with me."
"canHELPmaybe." Her holographic generator hummed as she moved to his other side, and a hand appeared, held out towards him. "can distractionbe. make forget you allabout problems YES?"
"Therein lies part of the problem," he explained. "If I need to rely on somebody else to help me get over this problem I have, then the problem hasn't truly gone away. By using another person as a crutch I am merely proving to myself that I am too weak to overcome my own issues."
"hmmmBORINGsounds. howzabout someFUNthen? noneed for crutchBEING. canjusthave funfunfun bringT-BIRDtooYES?"
He looked at her outstretched hand. Fun. How long had it been since he'd had any? Not since Paris, with Betsy. But that was many, many months ago, and he hadn't exactly been... himself... at the time. Only a third of the man he'd once been, in fact. And not even the best bits of a third. Not the bit that could love with all its heart or employ a powerful misdirection.
No, Paris had not been fun. It had been the beginning of the end. The start of all his problems. He'd never experienced such overwhelming jealousy until his three brains had been fused back into one body. The inference was clear; he'd put himself back together wrong.
A bitter pill to swallow.
The door to the room swished open, and Psylocke walked in. MeMe snatched back her hand as if she'd been bitten by a viper, then looked suspiciously guilty, for a holographic projection.
"heyPSYLOCKE whatsup?"
"I wanted to talk to you, MeMe," the purple-haired beauty replied. She shot a meaningful look at Fantomex. "Alone."
He rose from his chair and offered her a bow. Just one quick movement, a toss of the knife, and she'd bleed out faster than a slaughtered pig. "Of course, mademoiselle." He hated her. Hated her and loved her, both at the same time. Yet one more dichotomy in his life. She stood just within the room, so he slipped past her, and glanced at her unprotected back. One hand on each side of her head. A quick turn. She'd be dead before she hit the ground.
The door swished closed, and he let out a deep breath. This was his life, now. A constant battle to prevent himself killing the people he very loosely called friends. An unending war between the homicidal mutant-killing sentinel programming that made up the very core of his being, and the values that had been instilled in him by the woman he called Mother.
He glanced down at his watch. Twenty hours before the next Cable clone would expire.
It was going to be a long day.