Profiles Echelons of the Cybermen by Tony J Fyler

You will be like uzzzz, says Tony.

Ahhh, the Cybermen.

Remember when the Cybermen were simple? When they came from Mondas, escaped to Telos, and from there went stomping metallically all over the galaxy?

These days, the Cybermen have more origin stories than you can shake a Cyber-stick at – to slightly misquote the Twelfth Doctor and the Master in World Enough And Time, the Cybermen are easy, they’re inevitable, and they happen almost everywhere. That’s an interesting take on Doctor Who’s silver medal monsters – the Daleks are always the Daleks, even when, in the likes of Tranquil Repose in Revelation of the Daleks, they can have started out as something else. But the Cybermen begin everywhere.

There’s something in this notion that speaks to why the Cybermen are actually more scary than the Daleks. The Daleks depend on a sense of superiority, of supremacy, of racial gubbins – in essence, they depend on believing a lie. Whereas the Cybermen depend, ultimately, on an inescapable truth – the truth of decay and death, and the fear that inevitability instils. Cybermen are what you get when the fear of pain and ageing and death meets the technological ability to render them irrelevant.

The Cybermen will be along directly.

Throughout the history of Doctor Who of course, it’s not just the origins of the Cybermen that have changed and expanded. The range of Cyber-types there have been have expanded as necessary too, to tell different types of story.

The Cyberman

Your common-or-garden Cybermen is the essential unit of every Cyber-army. Throughout the history of the show, even quite what is inside a Cyberman has evolved. Initially, in the Mondasian version, they were meant to be mostly organic, but with more and more spare parts added and more and more meat removed, giving them an ability to withstand enormous cold, deliver enormous strength and pressure, as essentially outlast any organic life – unless, for some reason, their planet was destroyed, as they drew their energy directly from it. Over the years, the process of Cyberization too has evolved – while for decades, they seemed to grow and evolve in tubes (from The Invasion all the way through to Earthshock), and while in their ice-tombs on Telos they appeared to automatically evolve and upgrade themselves (from Tomb of the Cybermen to Attack of the Cybermen), the business of becoming a Cybermen seemed to remain a fairly straightforward one, along the lines described in The Tenth Planet – bits removed, bits added. It seemed like a longish, surgical process, with an element of mind-control (as in The Moonbase, where humans are put under Cyber-control, without undergoing the physical mutilation necessary to properly upgrade). Attack of the Cybermen, as was perhaps fitting for the Sixth Doctor’s era of questionable violence, took the whole process of Cyberization to a newly gruesome level, showing humans mid-upgrade, and what happened when the conditioning necessary to accept Cyber-conversion didn’t work – Stratton and Bates being partial Cybermen who’d retained their own minds. The gruesomeness was retained when the Cybermen returned in New Who, with images of saws and rotating cutters and the sounds of screams turning human beings into Cybermen in industrial quantities. Where the lack of emotion had always been assumed to be a part of the conversion process, the time of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors went down the route of emotional inhibitors, rather than brain surgery – making the Cybermen as vulnerable to emotion as they’d once been to gold or solvents. That whole business has been tinkered with in the years since the Tenth Doctor, with whole people being encased in Cyber-bodies in Closing Time and Death in Heaven, but also in Death In Heaven, Cybermen being created from corpses in graves – so, little more than skeletons, certainly with no organic, squishy brains as part of the process. Along the way, there’s also been probably the most forward-looking approach to conversion in Nightmare In Silver – the Cyber-Mites (about which, more in a minute), which appear, like the nanobots of Dark Water and Death In Heaven, to eat the organic tissues of their victims away, seeding Cyber-technology, programming and interfaces as they go. These microscopic upgraders are very much a 21^st century, forward-looking approach to Cyber-conversion – as mentioned in Death In Heaven, this is technology that allows the Cybermen to build their armies from the dead as well as the living, that requires no giant processing plants or factories, and which gives them the numerical supremacy that can genuinely evolve them from the sick, agonised, ever-living zombies of World Enough And Time (and, the imputation is, therefore of The Tenth Planet) to the hordes of the occasionally-mentioned Cyber-Wars, so implacable, so unstoppable that the standing order of armies by the time of Nightmare In Silver is that if you’re standing on a planet with the Cybermen, you blow up the planet.

Cyber Leaders
If we approach the idea of the Cybermen logically – and let’s, it’s what they’d want – the notion of a necessary command structure should be irrelevant. If there is a supreme authority, every Cyberman’s orders should come from that authority, and teams and squadrons and research divisions and so on should simply carry out those orders, indefatigably.

But of course, that would put enormous strain on the processing power of the likes of Cyber Planners and CyberControllers. Particular groups or task forces are therefore put under the sub-command of a Cyber Leader. There have historically been visual signs of ‘command’ in Cyber Leaders, usually extending to a differently modulated vocal unit and a darkened set of head-handles for instant recognition in a race which thrives entirely on the basis of uniformity.

Cyber Leaders are very much ‘first among equals’ in their group of Cybermen – tasked with group-specific orders, and identified as the commander of the group, so as to get specific tasks accomplished for the advancement of the Cyber-race.

It has also, historically, been useful for the Doctor to have a point of contact or debate with the Cybermen, and Cyber Leaders have often been the highest delegated Cyber-authority with whom the Time Lord has been able to discuss the possession or not of emotion, the skulking defeat of the Cyber-race by glitterguns, the pleasures of a well-prepared meal, the life or death of the CyberController, or the pleasure of jazz.

Interestingly, there’s less logic to the idea that any Cyber Leader needs a designated Cyber Lieutenant, particularly when there are only relatively small numbers of Cybermen in their troop – but certainly, Cybermen went through a phase where any activated Cyber Leader had a ‘faithful’ (or indeed, relatively frequently, a ‘right gobby’) Cyber Lieutenant to argue with them, put counter-logic or, if necessary, lead patrols into catastrophic Cyber-killing massacres. The only real sense to the notion of the Cyber Lieutenant would seem to be that as they are a species governed by logic, for every Leader you need a Lieutenant precisely to be a gobby little git, to regularly test the logic of the commands and decisions made by the commander of a group.

Or perhaps – just perhaps – Cybermen are perpetually trapped in their metal bodies and have no emotional context to their lives, so they just really need someone to talk to.

The CyberController

As the Daleks have Davros, the Supreme Dalek and the Emperor Dalek at the top of their command structure, confusing the bejesus out of the cosmos - and frequently themselves – about where their ultimate loyalty lies (Let us never again speak of the absurdity that is the Parliament of the Daleks), so the Cybermen too, as a species, have had various points of control and command at the top of their organisational pyramid. One of the most persuasive of those ‘rulers’ was the CyberController – the biggest brain in CyberTown, with a fairly chunked-out body to boot, so as to fit in more processing power and system resilience. First introduced as the leader of the Telosian Cybermen in Tomb of the Cybermen, the fact that it emerged from the deep freeze with its warriors suggests that the CyberController had been in charge of previous CyberOperations – perhaps, though this is pure speculation, the CyberController was a Telos-specific Controller, charged to ensure the success of the cryogenic operations there. Certainly, when it emerged again in Attack of the Cybermen, the inference is that it’s been ‘merely damaged’ on Telos from the time of the Tombs episode until the Cybermen returned to Telos, captured a time vessel and tried to prevent the destruction of Mondas – nobody’s entirely clear as to why they would do such a thing for what must have been their Mondasian predecessors, but then nobody’s entirely clear of a whole heck of a lot about Attack Of The Cybermen.

What’s certainly true is that when the Cybermen evolved on an alternative dimension with an entirely different origin story, their creator, John Lumic, was hailed as the CyberController despite, it seems, keeping more of his emotional intelligence intact than is usual for the CyberController units. Lumic was even given a kind of Steel Throne, to maintain his inputs and outputs to his growing Cyber-Army, only rising to the legs he hadn’t used in years when absolutely necessary to capture escaping fugitives. Depressingly, the extra-chunky CyberController body-form was unable to master the physics of climbing a rope ladder at speed, suggesting – as the previous versions of the CyberController also had – that if you’re going to build an extra-brainy Cyberman, it’s best to keep them safely computing, rather than joining the action in any especially meaningful way.

The CyberKing And Miss Hartigan

Talking of steel thrones, it’s worth noting how the Cybermen survive in extreme circumstances. Spat out of a never-ending nullity in the Void, the Cybermen who terrorised Victorian London were on the steampunk side – physical order-updates via info-stamp, rather than wifi connection to the Cyberiad for order-updating, the use of children as a captive labour force to build a mobile Cyber-processing plant (we can only assume this would have involved an old-style physical, flesh and steel-melding upgrade). And as these Cybermen were from a reality in which they had a CyberController, they intended to put a human into their Controller’s role, cunningly renamed the CyberKing as the controlling intelligence behind their mobile upgrade-plant of the same name. Mercy Hartigan was…a less than ideal choice for the role, perhaps, as she brought a scarred and victimised and vengeful personality to the equation, but on the one hand, she’s the poster girl for everything the Cybermen think they bring to the party of the universe – freedom from the messiness of emotion, the powerlessness of pain – and on the other, when it turns out her emotional mind can subdue the cold logic of the Cybermen, she’s an example of what the Cybermen would be without their famous logic. They’d be an army in service to a central, emotional intelligence. In Miss Hartigan’s case, that emotion was vengeance. In Craig Owens’ case, when they tried the same trick in other extreme circumstances in Closing Time, the emotion was love, and in both cases, the Cybermen fared badly, the incompatibility between the reason they exist and an emotional Controller enough to cause them severe logic-issues. But whereas the random stab of love Craig felt for his human life and his son was enough to destroy them (famously to ‘blow them up with love’), Mercy Hartigan’s vengeance-filled mind actually seemed able to bend the Cyber-force to its will. Revenge of the Cybermen, indeed…

Cyber Planners And The Cyberiad

As the Cybermen evolved and advanced, they appear to have moved away from the strictly linear command structure of their supposed humanoid origins, and to have taken on more of a colony-model. With more Cybermen spread across greater and greater portions of space, the need for Cyber Planners became more evident, as a strategic interface between Cyber-bodies on the ground of particular operations and the rest of the Cyberiad (or hive). The Cybermen used a local Cyber-Planner in their invasion of Earth involving Tobias Vaughan, and in their operation against the Wheel In Space – both of which appeared to be mostly machine components. By the time the Eleventh Doctor encountered the Cybermen on Hedgewick’s World, they had advanced enough to appreciate the flexibility of wetware once more, and planned to use the brain of an organic creature – first, some children, then the Doctor himself, with his knowledge of time travel (executive class) and regeneration to add to the Cyberiad’s knowledge-base. It’s implied in that story that in his case, they would be prepared to make him the overall Cyber-Planner, rather than any local mesh-level Planner overseeing operations in a given territory, showing that while the Cybermen had out-evolved their linear hierarchies, they were by no means averse to making use of a centralizing authority, presuming it brought enough to the species as a whole and its ability to advance and conquer.

Cyber-Pets

If you’re going to conquer the universe, you’re going to need underlings. Sub-creatures to do your dirty work for you. Daleks have Robomen, Ogrons, pig-slaves and, depending on the work, any random humanoids they happen to find.

The Cybermen, as in many areas, have always been rather more elegant in their approach to underlings. Almost as long as we’ve known of them, the Cybermen have come with ratlike creatures called Cybermats, which were their version of the Sonic Screwdriver – multi-purpose tools, but sneaky and able to hide from sight. They could chew through cables, gnaw through base walls, and even discretely infect organic creatures with poisons, diseases or other useful toxins, to minimise the likelihood of Cyber-casualties. While mostly seen in the Classic series, the Cybermats made one appearance in New Who (Closing Time), where their original organic form was revealed. It’s possible of course that given the variety in shape, size and design of the Cybermats to which we’ve been exposed on TV that the Cybermats – like the Cybermen – are not all from a single species, but are creatures local to the time and place of any given Cyber-operation, upgraded and set to work as needed.

That would certainly seem to be the way of things with the CyberShades – doglike creatures used by the Victorian Cybermen, with a particular ability to run up walls, and a faceplate more steampunk, brass and angular than those of the Cybermen who evolved elsewhere. It was never made entirely clear in The Next Doctor why the CyberShades had been created, except perhaps for the necessity of doing the hard, fast sheepdog work of keeping the locals in line, given that there were limited number of ‘Void’ Cybermen in Victorian London and the existence of wolfhound-like creatures to convert was likely to make for an easy, logical and resource-light solution to the crowd control problem.

If we’re taking the Cybermen in new directions though, Neil Gaiman must be credited for one of the biggest leaps forward in terms of Cyber-pets, creating as he did the Cyber-Mites – mostly, it seems, machine creatures, that can infect organics with Cyber-technology and begin their conversion process. The Cyber-Mites were a very 21^st century approach, a halfway stage between the Cybermats of old and the next, logical evolution of Cyber-conversion, the nano-cloud, as seen in Death in Heaven.

The Nanocybes (they’re not called that, not anywhere, but hell, that means the word’s mine now) are perhaps the ultimate Cyber-pets – somewhere between Cyber-fleas and Cyber-leucocytes – which can, individually or in numbers, convert any viable organic creatures into Cybermen, CyberShades, Cybermats etc, depending on body-type.

Once you’ve reached this point in Cyber-evolution of course, the question becomes – as Gaiman mentioned in Nightmare In Silver, and Stephen Moffatt in Death In Heaven – how you win against an army that can turn the rain against you and weaponize the dead.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, after reaching this pinnacle-point, we went back very significantly to basics at the end of the Twelfth Doctor’s time, to the almost-Mondasian Cybermen, focusing on their pain, their need to escape from that pain, and the extremes to which they could be driven in a monstrous quest to live forever.

When the Cybermen return to meet the Thirteenth Doctor (as is at least rumoured for Series 12), it’ll be interesting to see whether the show takes the Cybermen forward from the point of their practical invulnerability (oh, and did we mention, they can fly now?!), or backward, artificially engineering a new weakness into the Cyber-design or mentality (to go along with solvents, gravity, radiation, gold, emotion, more gold, love, specifically, etc) to make them defeatable again. Or will the writers – dare the writers – add something new to the echelons of the Cybermen, that helps explain the way in which these walking avatars of ageing, death and fear go about the business of conquering the universe?