SENTINELS

After the events of House of M left only a few hundred mutants alive on Earth, the U.S. government's Office of National Emergency — O.N.E. — made the strangest posting decision in Sentinel history. It stationed a squad of giant Sentinels on the grounds of the Xavier Institute itself, on the front lawn of the school they were built to menace, with an official mission no Sentinel had ever carried before: protect the mutants inside.

These were not the autonomous hunters of old. The Sentinel Squad O.N.E. machines were piloted — a trained human crew member climbed inside each unit and drove it, which put a person's judgment between the mutant students and the weapon. The program's recruits trained under James Rhodes, the Avenger War Machine, and their shakedown was laid out across the five-issue miniseries Sentinel Squad O.N.E. #1–#5 (2006), by John Layman and Aaron Lopresti.

Nobody at the school mistook the arrangement for kindness. The students lived under the gaze of the very machines that had hunted their kind for decades, close enough to hear the servos from the dormitories, and the pilots knew their charges feared them. It remains the one era when a Sentinel's orders pointed outward from Xavier's gates instead of inward — a guard dog built from a wolf, trusted exactly as far as its leash.