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….
Otherwise, Erik Lehnsherr was a law-abiding, respectable citizen heading a private charitable foundation dedicated to helping victims of military actions, headquartered in San Francisco.
In many ways, the foundation was a front, but it did provide help to the needy, only these needy were mutants whom Magneto recruited in roughly the same way Xavier did.
And just like Xavier, he had only a few adult associates in the active composition of the organization, who mainly coached the youth.
Besides this, Lehnsherr was listed in several scientific and medical societies, being a certified doctor with a decent track record, though he had long retired from active practice.
Such connections allowed him to conduct research into the nature of mutation and design his "doomsday machine" without much trouble.
It reached the point where he simply ordered some complex calculations directly from academies and institutes, where ordinary people forged the weapon of their own defeat for him, suspecting nothing.
As for the machine itself, the history of its creation went back to the Cerebro project, developed jointly with Xavier.
Back in the stage of cloudless cooperation, the two great mutants discovered that the magnetic fields generated by Erik's body were incapable of harming either delicate electronics or the human brain, and generally weren't magnetic fields (from a classical point of view) at all.
It was more a form of gravity, but for some reasons unknown to researchers, it affected only metals.
Nevertheless, it possessed some properties of a magnetic field.
Specifically, the friends discovered that with directed influence on a telepath's brain, Lehnsherr's ability could resonate with that brain's own electromagnetic field and somehow amplify telepathic abilities.
In Xavier's case, allowing him to reach people on the other side of the planet, whereas Charles's usual level was limited to a radius of ten kilometers.
Having started to study this phenomenon, the mutants never managed to understand its nature, but they experimentally established the effects and safe boundaries of exposure.
Madmen… Everything on themselves, everything personally. True enthusiast scientists.
How they didn't kick the bucket in the process, I don't understand, but they resuscitated each other regularly and still pushed forward.
In the end, the friends' persistence was rewarded, and they managed to reproduce the desired effect on purely technical principles.
Thus, the Cerebro complex appeared. A true masterpiece of Earth engineering and, in fact, the first Earth device with neural interface functions.
With its help, Charles could amplify his abilities many times over and not only read thoughts but also find anyone anywhere on the planet, manually filtering the one needed mind out of billions.
And then the guys had a falling out. But neither forgot their developments. Professor X obviously improved and refined Cerebro, while Magneto went into a different field, greatly aided by obtaining some information about a government project from the forties to create a super-soldier serum. The very one that created Captain America.
The secret of the original serum was lost in this world just as in other variations of the Marvel universe, so Erik couldn't physically obtain anything significant about it, but he became interested in the topic.
But since he was quite far from organic chemistry and genetic engineering, he preferred to seek his solution in the field of physics and already tested technologies of magnetic influence on the organism. And, it must be said, he achieved his goal.
His machine for turning ordinary people into mutants was a highly interesting project.
Let's start with the fact that it was "tailored" exclusively for Mr. Lehnsherr with his talent for generating pseudo-magnetic fields.
The main trick was that the machine forcibly reconfigured such fields into pure electromagnetic radiation, but also very specific radiation, which, when affecting the human organism, provoked an avalanche-like mutation of cells.
For Magneto himself, this was again a black box, on the principle of "I know that if I feed such-and-such a signal into it, I'll get such-and-such an effect, but how this effect is realized inside is unknown to me."
However, after examining Senator Kelly's condition, a certain conjecture arose in me. And the longer I thought about it, the more confirmation I found for it in the knowledge of this reality that I possessed.
Most likely, it was about the notorious X-gene. The locals didn't know what it was, because the human genome hadn't been decoded yet, let alone the mutant genome with their widest spectrum of abilities.
Therefore, they used this term to designate a hypothetical root cause of natural mutation, assuming that a set of nucleotides responsible for acquiring a particular ability was indeed present in the DNA molecule.
Nevertheless, if relying on the statistics of the mutant population increase, which I hinted at in the conversation with Magneto in the helicopter, these very X-genes must already be present in a very significant percentage of people, just currently remaining in a recessive state.
And here the principle of Lehnsherr's device becomes immediately clear. Radioactive radiation, even unknown radiation, cannot simply take and rebuild a formed organism; it's like trying to rebuild a house by dousing it with a stream of flame from a flamethrower. That is, you can cause damage, but you can't re-lay the roof that way.
It's another matter if the "potential" is already laid down. Loki's knowledge of genetics not only allowed but had vivid examples of such restructuring.
Starting from the banal mechanism of molting and changing fur depending on the season in a number of animals, ending with himself, with the transition to the Jotun state under the influence of extremely low temperatures and the return to the Aesir form under normal conditions.
The problem was that humans didn't have such a mechanism. A recessive gene could become dominant, but only in the next generation, by a natural path, so to speak.
However, the field generated by Magneto's machine artificially brought the necessary section of the genome into dominance in an already mature and formed organism.
As a result, the restructuring took place, but here the analogy is appropriate where a wall is smashed through with a battering ram, a window is slapdash put in place of the hole, and the old one is boarded up with debris.
That is, it is now possible, but the beauty and strength of the entire structure will leave much to be desired.
….
Bonus Chapter on every 500 power stones;
If you want to read ahead by 20+ chapters from here you can visit my Patre-on.
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