Dear Vector Prime, how did Ultimate X-Spanse get involved with the X-Men? Is he an Outlier?
Dear X-Acting X-pert,
Indeed, Ultimate X-Panse is an Outlier. As for how he got involved with the X-Men…
The bot originally known as Expanse was one of the artificial Outliers created by the Senate, through experimentation on leftover sparks produced during the Silver Harvest. Like many other Outliers he ended up at the Jhiaxan Academy of Advanced Technology, where he met many of his future teammates. His telepathic powers were limited at first, unable to read other minds, capable only of transmitting the merest intrusive thought.
The Institute became aware of his gifts, and they forcibly recruited him. In an attempt to help awaken his gift, the Institute trained him as as a mnemosurgeon—by concentrating on his telepathy, he was able to use a kind of "psychic dagger" or claw to replace the mnemosurgical needles, allowing him to access the minds of others with no messy entry holes.
Unfortunately for the Institute, Expanse spared little time in putting his talents to work on his minders, discovering what they really thought of him, and how they were replicating his gift to aid their attempts at memory manipulation—what would in the future become the basis of the Institute's "nudge guns." Expanse fled in the night, after wiping the minds of whoever he could to ensure he was not tracked, and went underground.
He would have remained an empty, wandering the streets, were he not recognised by a member of the nascent Decepticon movement, the ambitious Ramjet. Taking Expanse under his wing, in the hopes that he’d serve as a useful ally in future, Ramjet welcomed the Outlier to the ranks of the Seekers, and advised him to keep his gift hidden. Over the cycles, however, Expanse’s powers strengthened, until he didn’t need his psychic daggers to once again become all too aware of what his so-called friends and allies thought of him, and indeed the cruelty many of them had veiled under the guise of ideology. After following Ramjet to a planet named Earth, he found an opportunity to cut ties with the Decepticon faction, and disguised himself as the vehicle belonging to a group of human warriors; the Avengers’ Quinjet.
As it turned out, humanity had Outliers of their own: the mutant Wolverine’s enhanced senses were able to sniff out the Cybertronian. After an initial misunderstanding and altercation, Expanse managed to explain his backstory and circumstances. They struck a chord with Wolverine, who took responsibility of the ex-Seeker, taking him to meet with his fellow mutants at a New England Mansion. Under the guidance of their leader, the powerful telepath Charles Xavier, Expanse learned to better use his gift to help others. He assumed the form of one of their X-Jets, and even altered his name to fit in with his newfound family—becoming Ultimate X-Panse, fierce defender of Mutant-kind.
When the Decepticons once again invaded Earth, he took a backseat role, unable to face his former comrades, instead helping evacuate as many human civilians as he could from targeted population centers. Many of Ultimate X-Spanse’s mutant comrades were lost in the attacks, and in the aftermath he stood alone in a harsh political climate of anthropocentric conservatism: the desire to return the planet to a simpler time, when superpowers and extraterrestrials were the stuff of comic books, not reality. Of course, this movement betrayed its own hypocrisy through its proposed solution: reverse-engineering Cybertronian technology to create giant robotic Sentinels. When these bionic enforcers were activated, Ultimate X-Spanse was there to meet them.
