Survival Instinct Will Alter Their Programming

So next month, we're going to see Nova on the world of Kvch, the original homeworld of the Phalanx, as Richard is hoping he'll find something to help him fight said Phalanx. Initially, I was going to talk about how I was hoping we'd find out how the Phalanx began, what was the origin of their hivemind, techno-organic structure, and things like that. Then I did a little poking around on Wkipedia, and felt like going a different direction.

I didn't know the Phalanx are sort of an offshoot of beings like Warlock (the one from the old New Mutants series, not Adam Warlock), called the Technarcy. I vaguely remembered Douglock being around when the Phalanx first really established themselves as a threat, but that was in '90s X-Men comics, so I think I can be forgiven for not trying too hard to follow what was happening. The Wiki entry also told me the Phalanx are considered abominations by the Technarcy, who pride themselves on their individuality, while the Phalanx tend to lack that quality. That's kind of interesting. It doesn't explain how a techno-organic race originated, but it did raise some other questions for me.

See, the entries say that when the Phalanx in a region reach a certain number, they construct a Babel Spire, which sends a signal to the Magus, ruler of the Technarcy, who shows up and destroys all Phalanx. It's clearly not something they should want to do, but it's hardwired into what passes for the genetic code of the transmode virus. And in Conquest, they have built a Spire, but they've also created a barrier, which means the Magus can't get in. Apparently, Ultron wasn't able to eliminate the instinctive drive to build the Spire, but he was able to instill in them a need/desire/urge to build a device that would protect them from the doom the Spire brings.

Of course, that still raises the question of how they learned to build a device that, as Phyla put it, did something not even Galactus is capable of, by shifting the Kree Galaxy out of "normal" space. Where would they have found that technology? Off hand, I'd suggest either the Rigellians, who created the Recorders and were big on collecting knowledge and could have either created such a device, or found records of it somewhere in their explorations, or the Celestials. Where are they getting the power to maintain it? It seems pretty likely that now the energy is being supplied by the Kree that are being "processed", but where did they get the energy for the initial creation of it? They hadn't been invading that long, could they already have captured and processed enough Kree to construct the barrier, or did they sacrifice some of themselves for the energy? That seems like a very "hivemind" thing to do.