Sentinels #5: "Factory Settings"

[alliterator]

"The tapestry of X is so rich, every supposedly minor character is always someone’s favourite so you have to treat them all with respect. That said, there are underutilized characters that I am using, absolutely. There are no minor characters, and I plan to use them exhaustively. It’s a very deep bench, and there are characters with five appearances who are just as cool as Wolverine."
-- Alex Paknadel


Previously: Larry Trask's new Sentinel program isn't going to well. Without mood regulators, the human Sentinels will begin to "graft" and go full robot. It turns out this is because Trask didn't build the new Sentinel technology himself -- instead, he harvested it from "the Boy from the Junkyard," Juston Seyfert (previously seen dying in Avengers Arena) who had a Sentinel Mark VI that tried to bring him back from the dead using nanotechnology.

Also, one of the human Sentinels, Drumfire, has been having hallucinations of Onslaught. It turns out there was a very good reason for that...





Drumfire crashes a huge Sentinel into Lockstep and stops him from killing Sawtooth. They free Juston together.

Comments

[cainofdreaming]

So, basically, there's a new type of Phalanx running about. And, not seen in these scans, it seems unable to stop infecting people too. That part not being under the conscious control of the Juston unit.

[alliterator]

It only infected the five main Sentinels, so no, it's not "uncontrollable." And while Juston can't stop them from "grafting," it turns out that grafting doesn't need to be a bad thing.

[cainofdreaming]

It was contained in a tube until they freed it. So it didn't really have a chance to come into contact with others. It also couldn't keep the bits removed from it from infecting the Sentinel troops, like regular Phalanx could.

[alliterator]

I mean, it's flesh was harvested and injected into humans. That doesn't make it contagious. Nothing at all in the comic says that it's contagious. You are simply jumping to conclusions.

This is like saying Warlock is contagious because he sometimes merges with Cypher.

[icon_uk]

The technorganic virus is infectious and Warlock could be (controllably) contagious.

Normally it wasn't an issue because Warlock only released the virus to transmode things to absorb the lifeglow from, leaving them inert and dead, so no longer infectious or contagious, when he was finished.

The rest of the time Warlock could touch and hold things like normal because he wasn't in, for want of a better term "contagious mode"

Doug was repeatedly warned that there was a strong likelihood of him becoming infected with the virus permanently when they merged, and some evidence to suggest he was.

The original Phalanx infestation on Earth from the Phalanx Covenant were apparently the result of leaving still living TO organisms around the place, spreading and infecting other beings through touch (so, again, contagious) until they reached critical mass and formed a Phalanx.

[alliterator]

That's my point: Warlock is only infectious when he wants to be or when he's merged. Not when he's just a regular Technarch walking along the street.

There is no indication that Juston is contagious to normal people at all. The reason the human Sentinels were infected was because they were *deliberately* infected.