BIOGRAPHY - Page 5
Following that incident Forge became interested in alternate timelines. He constructed a device to scan for mutants in alternate timelines. However, he quickly learned, as he later told Hank McCoy, that they had all “flatlined,” including the Age of Apocalypse, the XSE and the Nimrod futures, meaning either the futures no longer existed or they did but there were no more mutants in them. [X-Factor (3rd series) #23]
When against all odds a new mutant child was born, the possibilities for the different futures changed again and several forces, human and mutant both, hunted the baby, which was abducted 
by Cable. Cyclops asked Forge for help on a mission. He was to send two dupes of Jamie Madrox to two different futures. As it would turn out later, in one of these futures the mutant child became the savior of the mutant race, whereas in the other, she would cause the death of millions. Cable eventually made his way to Eagle Plaza, apparently to ask Forge for help. However, he found Forge shot and grievously injured, including serious head trauma, by the X-Man Bishop, who intended to kill the child as he believed she would grow up to cause his dark future. Only the timely arrival of an X-Men team saved Forge’s life, whereas Cable escaped into the future with the baby in tow and Bishop hot on their trail. [Messiah Complex crossover]
Forge returned to his home, still injured and finding himself fixating on ideas such as time-travel and improving his security. At the time, these fixations and the behavior that followed could have been considered a direct result of his head injury. [X-Men: Divided We Stand #2]
At some unknown point, Forge took up residence in the High Evolutionary’s former home atop Wundagore Mountain. As he was also driven by the need to fix the problem of the worldwide loss of mutant powers during M-Day, Forge came up with an “engineer’s solution” – creating mutants by injecting synthetic genetic material into the DNA of several humans (it’s unknown whether those were volunteers or victims). Thanks to his interest in alternate realities, Forge also learned that agents of another reality were preparing an attack on this Earth via their “Ghost Boxes.” He dispatched several of his new mutants to deal with them. A team of X-Men got involved in what seemed to be a clandestine war between different species of mutants at first and finally learned of the Ghost Boxes and Forge’s involvement. They visited him at Wundagore and were horrified to see he had created these mutated monsters.
Forge, who was clearly unhinged at that point, intended to force the X-Men to fight the would-be invaders alongside his mutants by activating the Ghost Box. Before the creatures of the other world could emerge, Agent Brand of S.W.O.R.D. threatened she would destroy Wundagore and the Ghost Box with a quantum laser cannon charged to several zetawatts. When Forge refused to back down and sicced his creations on the X-Men, Beast used a cell phone to tell Brand where to point her orbitally stationed laser cannon. The X-Men fled the area before the weapon was fired. When Storm asked Forge to come along, he refused her, clearly feeling humiliated by her marriage to the Black Panther. He was left to his fate and was believed to have perished when the laser beam hit, annihilating that portion of the mountain. [Astonishing X-Men (3rd series) #25-30]
Forge did survive, but he was trapped in the wreckage of Mount Wundagore scrounging for food and supplies for months. He was eventually located by Cable, who was in need of Forge’s services. As a telepath, Cable projected into Forge’s consciousness a representational image of his own mind, made to look like machinery. This triggered Forge’s powers, and he impulsively 
went to work “fixing” the machine to get it into working order again. As a metaphor, this translated to his own mental health, and so Forge slowly repaired his mind, reorganizing his thoughts to remove the paranoia and compulsive tendencies he had exhibited in recent months. Together, Forge and Cable restored his sanity and stability. [Marvel Now! Point One #1]
Cable wanted Forge’s engineering help to replace his lost bionics. Recently cured of his techno-organic virus, Cable’s remaining arm was atrophied from the loss of the excess bio-mechanical matter. While Forge designed a new exoskeletal arm sling (and laser eye) for Cable, Nathan also went to the X-Men’s bio-sciences expert Doctor Nemesis over the migraines and seizures he was experiencing since the virus was cured. Along with Colossus and Domino, they became the core of a new X-Force team when Cable discovered his headaches were the result of precognitive visions feeding him information about upcoming threats. Unfortunately, their first mission went FUBAR and X-Force ended up branded as terrorists after the deaths of dozens of innocent people infected with a mutating virus. [Cable & X-Force #1-4]
On the run, Forge and Nemesis hid out in Mexico before linking up with the rest of the team. A scientist and an engineer, the two brilliant mutants often quibbled over how to approach a problem. They decided to settle their debate in the ring, where Forge’s mechanically-engineered giant ape robot narrowly beat Nemesis’s chemically super-sized mutant scorpion (though Nemesis insisted the scorpion threw the match). X-Force eventually took up residence in a 
massive underground bunker Forge had established under the Cheyenne reservation. Forced to spread out and deal with several pertinent threats at once, Cable was captured by the Avengers while X-Force was in the field. Forge and the team advanced on Avengers Mansion and ultimately made peace with the Avengers' Unity Division as they explained their actions. Cable’s power seizures were stabilized by his daughter Hope, and the team was given tacit support by Avengers leader Havok to continue. [Cable & X-Force #5-14]
In order to mitigate the stress Cable’s visions put on his body, Forge and Nemesis arranged a mechanical uplink that would remotely extract the precognitive information from Nathan’s mind and rout it into their base’s computer network for analysis and review. Nemesis first tested their neural-mapping on Forge, and accidentally revealed the presence of the Adversary in his mind. The Trickster God had apparently been nestled in Forge’s subconscious for years since their last 
encounter. While Boom Boom occupied the Adversary-possessed Forge, Nemesis projected his own mind into the neural-interface to rescue Forge. Forge was ready to kill himself in order to keep the Adversary from having a foothold on the physical plane, but Nemesis had a different plan. He reversed the flow of the neural-interface, bringing him, Forge and the Adversary into Nemesis’s mind. Doctor Nemesis’s own advanced cognitive powers allowed him to contain and dispose of the Adversary by means Forge could not. [Cable & X-Force #15-17]
Cable’s X-Force came to an end shortly after an encounter with a sister X-Force run by Storm and Psylocke. Hope and Bishop had been kidnapped by Stryfe in a plot against Cable, bringing the two rosters together. Forge reunited with Ororo, and had the opportunity to apologize to her for his crazed behavior at Wundagore. Forge had come to suspect the Adversary’s presence in his mind had unbalanced him during that period. He made peace with Ororo and offered sincere condolences over her recent divorce from T’Challa. [Vendetta crossover]