STUFF (A Look at Layla Miller and What She Really Knows)
Ever since she appeared in X-Factor (3rd series) #1, Layla Miller was defined by her eerie knowledge of current and upcoming events. Or, as she often put it, “My name is Layla Miller. I know stuff.” The exact origin and nature of this “stuff” she knew remained a mystery for several years, until it was apparently revealed in X-Factor (3rd series) #50. Layla’s future self had travelled back in time and used a device to imprint her younger self with her own memories. This trapped Layla in a time loop, giving her awareness of events to come but leaving her unable to alter the events as they came to pass.
1: Layla's early life
2: Layla meets her older self and is infused with future knowledge. [X-Factor (3rd series) #50]
3: House of M.
4: Layla joins X-Factor. [X-Factor (3rd series) #1]
5: Layla travels to Bishop's future with Madrox. [X-Factor (3rd series) #25]
A: ca. 80 years into the future
6: Layla orchestrates the start of the Summers Rebellion. [X-Factor Special: Layla Miller #1]
B: Five years pass in the future; Layla locates and reads detailed diaries written in the past by her future self.
7: Layla interacts with Madrox and travels back in time. [X-Factor (3rd series) #41-50]
C: Layla lays low for months in the present.
8: Layla reconnects with X-Factor. [X-Factor (1st series) #200]
9: Layla continues to record her exploits in daily diaries until an unknown date.
Blue arrow: Layla time travels.
Magenta arrow: Layla gains knowledge.
TIME STUFF
Time travel in the Marvel Universe takes place in one of three forms: preordained, paradoxical or parallel.
The universe can be flexible when it comes to the fourth dimension: sometimes it accepts that time travel will occur, and a timeline is naturally structured around incursions into the past. For instance, both Gambit and Blade have experienced adventures where they travelled back in time after being told to do so by someone who remembered seeing them in the past. Their influence on the past was already a pre-existing and inevitable part of the timeline.
A temporal paradox occurs when the timeline is altered in a manner that is fundamentally impossible, and the naturally occurring safeguards that protect the timestream are somehow avoided. This is what originally happened in the Age of Apocalypse, when Legion travelled back in time and killed his own father before he was even born. This was an impossibility and threatened all of existence when the M’Kraan Crystal began acting up in response to his actions. The timestream is normally protected against paradoxes, and so they typically only happen when time travel is done through a particularly powerful or unstable method.
Most time travel in the Marvel Universe involves the third method. As originally exposited by Reed Richards in Marvel Two-In-One #50 and #100, time travel cannot actually alter the past. Instead, it causes a second parallel timeline to branch out from the original history, maintaining the original history in one branch while creating a second branch where the time traveler’s actions took effect. This is time’s natural defense mechanism against the above-mentioned paradoxes, and has come to be known as the conservation of causality, or Kang’s Third Law of Time.
In Fantastic Four (1st series) #551-553, however, a future version of Doctor Doom established that Kang’s Third Law was not absolute, and time can be rewritten. Doom postulated that the timestream was flexible, and a certain mathematically calculable amount of change in a timeline was acceptable. Only large or significant changes above a certain level caused the creation of a parallel timeline. And so by carefully influencing the past in small ways, one can manipulate the future of one’s own timeline using time travel.
TECH STUFF
In X-Factor (3rd series) #46, an elderly Doctor Doom explained a form of technology he created known as Doomlocks which were at the core of that story arc. A Doomlock is a chronal variance inhibitor, which allows someone possessing the inhibitor to actively manipulate the past in order to alter the present. Doomlocks expand that mathematical window of causality to allow more substantial changes to be made in the timeline without inducing a new branch. Someone possessing a Doomlock would become, as von Doom put it, an “invariable” in their own timeline.
There were still some limitations to the technology, however. Firstly, the Doomlock had to be a part of the individual, typically after the individual had already become a cybernetic organism. There was also still a limit to the amount of change that could be forced on the timeline. When Cortex tried to kill the ancestors of the Summers Rebellion’s leaders in the present, he used avatars, mind-controlling native residents of the timeline to do his killing for him. When he was forced to take a direct hand, he worried that doing so could permanently damage the timestream.
RELEVANT STUFF?
Strictly speaking, we don’t know for sure that Layla’s knowledge is based on Doomlock technology. All we saw for certain was the elder Layla zapping the younger Layla behind the ear with a wand-shaped device, and stating she now had all her knowledge and memories. However, the entire previous year of X-Factor had focused on reintroducing Layla to the book, establishing her future-history with Doom, the existence of Doomlocks, and all building up to this moment. Still, there could always be more to the story.
Layla is in a unique situation because she is caught up in the same sequence of events that led to her gaining access to the Doomlock in the first place, creating a form of predestination paradox. As an “invariable,” Cortex acted on the past to influence events largely unconnected to him receiving the Doomlock. By giving Doomlock-protected knowledge of her future to her younger self, however, Layla created a self-preserving time loop that made her actions part of the original history. Thus, Layla Miller has knowledge of the future but effectively lacks the free will to change it, because attempting to change the events that led to her gaining the knowledge in the first place could create a universe-destroying paradox similar to the Age of Apocalypse.
Layla’s situation has recently changed, however, for better or for worse. Up until X-Factor (3rd series) #50, Layla was reliving her own lifetime, guided by the memories of her future self. Currently, Layla still “knows stuff,” but only second-hand. While in the Summers Rebellion future, Layla retrieved her diaries, books which chronicled everything she did or experienced in painstaking detail after returning to the present. As an example, Layla managed to have a conversation with Longshot during one of his psychometry visions in X-Factor (1st series) #201. She accomplished this by having Longshot later tell her exactly where to stand at what time and what they both said. Layla then recorded all this detail in her diaries, where she read it several years earlier and 80 years in the future during the Summers Rebellion.
The knowledge she received from reading these diaries keeps her informed about the future… assuming she’s a reliable narrator. Because the current Layla only has knowledge of reading the diaries, not writing them, she must trust that her own accounts are accurate. Layla recently attempted to lie to herself on the day Guido supposedly died according to her diaries. She saved Guido’s life but still recorded her diary as she remembered reading it. This act had consequences, though, the full extent of which we likely haven’t even seen yet.
STUFF NOT ANSWERED
Despite the source of Layla’s knowledge apparently being revealed, there are still some lingering questions regarding her situation. Several small details about what Layla is capable of remain unanswered. In Messiah CompleX, Layla was somehow able to temporarily beat the mutant detectors used by Sheepshead Bay guards, scanning as a mutant one moment and not as one 
the next. Additionally, Layla’s role in the House of M – acting as an anchor for the true reality, retaining her full memories and able to impose the truth on others – seems beyond what we know about her capabilities. Of course, the simplest explanation is “Doom did it” – whatever Doomlock technology was injected into Layla by the device also allowed her to do these things, if for no other reason than she remembered she did do them. Still, an official explanation has not been made.
Finally, Layla has occasionally referenced a higher power guiding her actions. In X-Factor (3rd series) #7, she told Madrox and Wolfsbane she would be struck dead if she told them how she knew stuff. In X-Factor (1st series) #230, Layla also stated she was being punished for resurrecting Guido. These statements could have been metaphorical. After all, if Layla’s memories told her she did not reveal her secret to Jamie and Rahne at that time, then doing so would have substantially changed history, possibly destroying the universe and striking them ALL dead. Still, the demon Bloodbath made several references recently to Layla being an acolyte, which naturally begs the question…
“An acolyte of what?”