This is just New Avengers: Illuminati 5, a cover only a few months old when this came out. An homage to a cover we saw just 17 days ago is kind of weird. Billy Tan is inked by Matt Banning this time, and still colored by Justin Ponsor. This one opens with a 2-page spread of Tony Stark showing up to an Illuminati meeting, wherein Tan more or less recreates Steve MicNiven’s 2-page image of Tony arriving at their meeting in NA 7, BUT it’s not that day, which is unnecessarily confusing if you asked me. Reed is even holding the weird tablet thing he had that other time. This time, the group was called together by Xavier, who wanted to talk about the Skrull situation. Specifically, when and how they might retaliate. Which seems like something he would’ve thought about closer to 60s comics than 2000s comics, but the outfits make it clear this is post-Extremis Iron Man, mid-2000s.
It turns out Xavier is a Skrull, and the rest of them are clones. He starts smashing them all to bits, and we see all this is in one of those little rooms where they do their weird experiments, like when Dorrek killed the Reed Richards one. This experiment is deemed a failure. And, much like that time, the costumes don’t really make sense, Iron Man’s armor, Reed’s suit, especially Reed’s tablet. Speaking of Emperor Dorrek, he shows up for a progress report. One of the scientists talks about how the Reed clone was figuring out how they could baffle the humans’ methods of detection, and suggests the concentrate on making Reed clones do the thinking for them, pointing out the irony of having Reed figure out the method by which they will subjugate Earth.
So, then, A Reed clone wakes up in a torture room, told to reveal what they want to know. The Skrulls bring in Sue, who begs him to tell them, and they shoot her. Then they bring in Franklin.
So then they have a Reed clone woken up in the night by Franklin, who’s heard Uncle Johnny talking about Skrulls and is scared they could be anyone, and walks Reed down the path of figuring out how they could evade detection, so he can make sure his son isn’t scared.
So Reed accidentally betrays mankind via a clone, and has no way of knowing he did it. But thus, we also know the real Reed could figure out how they did this, which he was working on in SI 5. More solid backstory.