PIPELINE

 

PIPELINE

Real Name: Cormick Grimshaw

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #235, August 1988

Powers: Pipeline was born with the mutant ability to digitize matter, converting it into streams of electronic information, and then direct and manipulate this information in different ways. Generally, his power serves as a means of teleportation: Pipeline will transform people or objects into electromagnetic coding, store them inside the datapad he carries with him, and then transmit them across a standard transmission signal to reconstitute them at a new location. It has been suggested that he could keep someone trapped indefinitely in a digitized state if he wished, or possibly kill them simply by erasing their file. His range is apparently limited only by the range of the transmission equipment he carries, which is to say instantaneous from America or Australia to the southeastern coast of Africa and back.

Pipeline often seems limited to transmitting only organic matter, as people he has kidnapped with his power tend to rematerialize without any clothes on. He has, however, summoned an entire armed Genoshan combat battalion before, and once mentioned having to recalibrate his sensors for inorganic matter. Operating on this assumption, Pipeline could conceivably transport both organic and inorganic matter, but must do so separately because of some difference in the transmission process. Transporting people with clothes and armaments could therefore be possible, but only with advanced time and planning to write "code" which would accommodate a combination of different digitized items. In addition, he has demonstrated the ability to incorporate additional lines of code into a transmitted person's digitized form, so that when they are reconstituted, they arrive with a simulated narcotic effect in their system that makes them more docile and compliant.

Pipeline was a member of the Genoshan Magistrates, law enforcement officers trained in hand-to-hand combat with access to a vast amount of advanced weaponry and equipment. He was a member of an elite group of Magistrates known as the Genoshan Press Gang, mutants who voluntarily chose to serve the Genoshan government, and so avoided undergoing the Mutate Bonding Process which would turn them into mindless slaves.