So this is a random thought I've been musing on for awhile......in the late 90s, there was a storyline where Cerebro went off the rails as its occasionally wont to do, and it created its own team of X-Men who were really just machines composed of nanobots.....but who had no idea they were artificial lifeforms, given that Cerebro had programmed them all with their own personalities, backstories, etc. These personas, or consciousnesses, were composites it created by combining the profiles and data it had on various X-Men and X-villains, to match up with the fake X-Men's designs, which were also amalgamations of X-Men and X-villains.
Basically....these fake X-Men were like early chimeras....but machine intelligences who believed themselves to be organic life forms at first.
Addison Falk aka The Grey King, was the leader of the team, and designed by Cerebro as a composite of Sebastian Shaw and Jean Grey. He was a genius with an enhanced super-intellect, telepathic and telekinetic abilities (which manifested in the form of a fiery raptor), and the additional psychic ability to neutralize mutant powers while he was around.
Sister Joy aka Rapture, was blue-skinned, red-haired, and had giant dove-like wings and an aptitude for swords. She was designed by Cerebro as a composite of Archangel, Mystique and Nightcrawler.
Dan Dash aka Xaos was autistic and with the power to fire bursts of explosive plasma from his eyes, designed as a composite of Cyclops and Havok.
Cristal Lemieux aka Crux believed herself to be a cocky French ice skater with the ability to manipulate both fire and ice, designed as a composite of Iceman, Pyro and Jubilee.
Lee Broder aka Landslide thought himself a Southern bartender with super-strength, healing and enhanced senses, and a white stripe in his hair similar to Rogue, as he was a composite of Rogue, Beast and Sabretooth.
And lastly, Mercury believed himself to be a hitman with a code of honor that made him turn on people who hired him to do jobs he considered to be too unconscionable, and he had the power to turn his skin into metal, that he could manipulate and make malleable, allowing him to turn his fingers into claws, etc. He was designed as a composite of Colossus, Wolverine and Magneto.
Like I said, basically they were the AI nanotech equivalents of chimeras genetically engineered to be combinations of existing mutants....and with their own distinct individual personalities, memories, etc, that they all believed to be true and real, even though Cerebro basically built those personalities and histories out of the data it had on mutants in its files.
So....my question is.....in a universe where there are absolutely AIs and machine intelligences who are considered sentient beings....are the Cerebro X-Men's consciousnesses any different from the back-ups Cerebro makes of mutants, even if they had different origins? And do the Cerebro back-ups potentially still have those consciousnesses stored alongside all the mutants its been used to back-up over the years?
Its just an interesting idea to me, if so....because then combine that with Sinister's interest in developing chimeras.....you could argue that the beings Cerebro designed out of nanobots could literally be replicated as organic lifeforms, by genetically engineering chimeras from the same mutants Cerebro used as ITS template for its X-Men.
And then....what if the consciousnesses Cerebro had uploaded into its nanobot X-Men back then....were placed in husks The Five or Sinister created for them?
We've seen Moira X change from her organic origins into a machine life form via uploading her consciousness into a machine body.
Theoretically, could the Cerebro X-Men be made into an inverse of that? Artificially originating machine life forms who change into organic life forms, via the mutant resurrection process being used to place their consciousnesses into genetically engineered mutant bodies?
(I'm not saying this could, should or would ever happen in the books, I'm honestly just curious about the idea, and the implications of it. Given the way mutant technology has opened up new avenues of creating and manipulating biological life, isn't the one way street of organic life seeking machine immortality maybe a two way street where machine life can seek organic existence? Consider also the implications for a being like Nimrod, who in this era originated as a human being who was turned into a machine life form in order to save him.....but whose mortal enemies, mutantkind, potentially have a way to give him BACK his original human existence).