Biography page 8
X-Force became active for a time, operating out of Forge’s bunker underneath the Cheyenne Reservation. Cable’s visions were mechanically relayed from his mind into the base’s alert system, reducing the psychic pressure on his head and letting the team objectively review the 
data flooding his mind. However, this also meant Hope saw a recorded vision of Bishop’s return before Cable did. Bishop was still the monster that haunted her dreams, but now Hope believed she was old enough and trained enough to purge her demons by killing Bishop. She found Bishop unprepared for her on the streets of Los Angeles. Hope lashed out at her tormentor, but was interrupted by the arrival of Stryfe.
Nathan’s evil clone brought Hope, Bishop and (later) Nathan to an abandoned Mutant Liberation Front bunker. Cable didn’t want Hope to turn into a murderer, so Stryfe intended to force him to watch Hope kill Bishop. Behind a two-way mirror, Nathan looked on as Stryfe left Hope and Bishop chained up alone in a room with the psimitar resting between them. Hope was ready to kill Bishop, but she was rational enough to realize if Stryfe wanted her to do it, she should hold back. Still, listening to Bishop try to explain himself was infuriating to her. Bishop had spent years in the 
future moving on from his crusade before returning to the present, giving him perspective. He admitted he was wrong for tormenting Hope’s life, but still believed abstractly that one death to undo billions was a reasonable quest. Bishop agreed with Nathan that it would scar Hope’s soul to kill him in cold blood. He saw himself and Cable as the two major influences on Hope’s life, the soldier and the zealot, and begged her to follow Cable’s example instead of his. Listening to Bishop try to give her advice triggered Hope, and she drove the psimitar into his chest.
Despite her impulsive reaction, Hope chose not to make it a lethal strike. She hit Bishop with a clean cut and removed the blade without permanent damage. She did not forgive Bishop, but recognized it was wrong to kill an enemy on his knees and chained. Stryfe was furious that his machinations failed, and was confronted by X-Force assembled to find Cable and Hope. In a 
spiteful final gesture, Stryfe telepathically forced Hope to copy more of his telekinetic power than she could handle, teleporting away but leaving Hope as a living bomb of uncontainable energy. It was Bishop who stepped forward and helped Hope control the energies, using his own experience rechanneling energy to guide her in releasing the accumulated power in one direction: safely straight up. Bishop’s changed spirit and his help saving Hope that day earned him a reprieve from Cable and Hope. For now. [Vendetta crossover]
X-Force was in the midst of reorganizing itself when Nathan and Hope attended the Alexandria security and defense symposium. At a speech by a mutant anti-war activist Antjie Qoboza, the woman was injected with the Volga Strain, a weaponized bio-chemical agent that turned her into a living bomb. Volga was an arms dealer intent on driving up his profits by framing a mutant for 
mass death and destruction, then selling “solutions” to frightened nations. Cable tried to intervene before Qoboza’s powers erupted, only to be injected with the Volga strain himself. Hope then tried to copy Cable’s corrupted powers, causing psychic feedback with unpredictable ramifications. Cable barely managed to bodyslide himself and Hope to safety as Antjie Qoboza exploded, and the Alexandria Incident became the new rallying call for mutant fear and oppression.
Volga used a musical cue to trigger the activist’s power breakdown prematurely on command, but the Volga Strain would inevitably break down on its own and kill Cable in 24 hours. To get around this while searching for a cure, Cable and Doctor Nemesis arranged to keep Cable’s original body preserved in stasis while fielding a consecutive series of clones. The Volga Strain was so tied to Cable’s genes that the clones became unstable and died every day as well, but a thought-log headband recorded his thoughts each day and passed them on to the next clone, creating mission 
continuity. Hope was in even worse condition than Cable, though. Her powers had created a psychic duplicate of Cable’s Volga-infected powers, leaving her body volatile and unstable like his, but for essentially a totally different reason. While she wasn’t exploding, Hope’s body collapsed into a comatose state as it tried to process the foreign input. Cable tasked Doctor Nemesis with finding a way to help him and Hope, while reassembling X-Force to perform shadow operations in general on behalf of mutantkind, and to specifically hunt down Volga. [X-Force (4th series) #6]
As Psylocke, Fantomex, and Marrow joined Cable’s X-Force, they discovered a new “cyber weapon” being used by Volga to override and control electronic systems during his operations. Cable correctly deduced the cyber weapon was actually a mutant, and X-Force conducted a rescue operation to turn the mutant into an asset for themselves. Dubbed “Meme,” this young girl was a datamorph whose consciousness existed in a digital state. Essentially brain dead in her 
containment tank after the recovery mission, Meme was stored in X-Force headquarters close enough for Hope to copy her powers. Held in a form of stasis due to the Volga Strain, Hope relied upon Meme’s powers to communicate and interact with X-Force. Believing her father wouldn’t allow her to risk herself, even in this state, Hope pretended to be the real Meme and lent her copied data-manipulation powers to X-Force’s mission operations. [X-Force (4th series) #1-2]
Meme was provided with a hover device to transmit her holographic avatar and provide a signal for her to link up with data systems the team encountered in the field. Psylocke, being psychic, recognized Hope for who she was but kept the secret from Cable. The team tracked down Volga’s floating hover yacht in the desert, but Meme was caught in a digital trap and most of the team was also captured. A new rendition of Cable was unthawed and conducted a rescue mission. The team learned more about the Volga Strain, but a cure was still beyond their grasp. Volga blew up himself and his laboratories to prevent X-Force from getting full access to his proprietary information. [X-Force (4th series) #3-6]
Able to interact with reality only as a post-human digital lifeform, Hope tried to adjust to her circumstances as best she could. She stole a kiss from a cute SAS soldier while investigating a British unit that bought samples of the Volga Strain. (Her holographic drones were projecting the 
body of a man and the soldier was gay, but it was a very confusing night for everyone.) Hope also propositioned Fantomex, whose nanotech blood gave him a partially digital consciousness so they could psychically interact on the digital plane. Sharing data between avatars in the datascape was the closest Hope could come to touching someone, and so she enjoyed the dalliance. [X-Force (4th series) #7-10]
Hope’s time with X-Force began to sour, however, as the team of “heroes” lost their way. Psylocke was a murder addict who kept slipping, while Marrow embraced insanity to avoid dealing with her own pain. Hope also saw a side of Cable she didn’t normally see. Whether it was because he didn’t know his daughter was around, or a moral decline from the cloning and re-cloning process, Nathan fell deeper into an “ends justifying the means” mentality, willing to do anything to raise the 
mutant flag higher. And Fantomex, who Hope had always known was unstable, still hurt her when he casually ditched their “relationship.” Hope was so hurt that she got distracted during a mission using Meme’s data-scanning abilities to access Fantomex’s mind. She was startled to learn he knew she was Hope all along, and that Cable knew how broken Fantomex was when he recruited him. (Ends. Means.)