B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (19 page)

The Birth of the Cybermen

There have been a number of accounts of the origins of the Cybermen.
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Millions of years ago, a twin planet to Earth - Mondas - was home to a race identical to humanity (indeed, Mondas was an old name for Earth). Mondas started to drift out to the edge of space.
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It soon became clear that the Mondasian race was becoming more sickly. Their life spans were shortening dramatically and they could only survive by replacing diseased organs and wasted limbs with metal and plastic substitutes. A new race was born.
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“Mondas had a propulsion unit, a tribute to Cyber-engineering - though why they should want to push a planet through space, I have no idea.”
 [198]

Mondas had been created by the Constructors of Destiny to research collective intelligence.
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? - “The Cybermen”
 [200]

On Earth’s twin planet of Mondas, the Silurians created monsters: the all-devouring Titan R’lyeh and the giant Golgoth, the distillation of the greatest reptilian bloodstock. The Silurians eventually imprisoned them.

Mondas spun away from the sun, but was still habitable. The Silurians became tyrants, the unquestioned rulers of the world and augmented the apes to make cybernetic servants. Eventually, the reptiles were driven into hibernation by worsening conditions.

After a thousand years, and the Millennium Winter, the Cybermen had evolved from the augmented apes. They destroyed their former masters and set out to conquer the planet, but soon discovered - when they accidentally released R’lyeh - that they were not the only surviving creations of the lizard kings. A lost Cyber-mission returned as phantoms, then the Cybermen fought necromantic Sea Devils and their deity, Golgoth. He created a son, then destroyed himself and the Cybermen in a battle lasting forty days and nights. The Cyber-civilisation fell.

Mondas and Marinus were the same planet.
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? - The Keys of Marinus
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The people of the planet Marinus built the Conscience: a machine that originally served as an impartial judge, but eventually became capable of radiating a force that eliminated crime, fear and violence for seven centuries. Yartek, the Voord leader, learned how to resist the Conscience, and thus his followers robbed and cheated without any resistance. The scientist Arbitan deactivated the Conscience, hiding the five micro-keys needed to operate it around the planet; this prevented the Voord from using the device to control the population.

The first Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara arrived on Arbitan’s island. They recovered all the keys on Arbitan’s behalf, but returned to find that Yartek had killed Arbitan and taken control of the Conscience. Ian tricked Yartek by giving him a facsimile of one of the keys, but once it was inserted into the Conscience, the duplicate broke under the strain. The Conscience exploded, killing Yartek.

? - “The Cybermen”
 [203]

Three thousand years after the fall of their civilisation, the Cybermen were legends to the humans that ruled Mondas. Once again, the planet’s orbit decayed. All life on the planet was extinguished, except for the reborn Cybermen.

? - “The World Shapers”
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The sixth Doctor, Peri and Frobisher landed on a deserted area of the ocean on Marinus. They discovered a TARDIS and its dying pilot, who whispered “Planet 14” before dying, his regenerations exhausted. His TARDIS was an ostentatious new model that told the Doctor they had been sent by the High Council to investigate temporal disturbances.

Time had sped up on Marinus. The new TARDIS returned to Gallifrey, the Doctor and his companions to their Ship. The Doctor remembered hearing about Planet 14 in his second incarnation, but not the context. The travellers headed to the eighteenth century to meet up with Jamie McCrimmon - his companion at the time - to see if he remembered. As they left, a Worldshaper ship arrived at Marinus - Worldshapers reformed uninhabited planets, but were banned years after the Yxia system collapsed.

The Doctor’s TARDIS returned a week later than it left... but the planet was a now rocky desert. The Voord captured the Worldshaper and used it to rapid-evolve themselves and sculpt time. They were becoming the Cybermen. The Doctor and Jamie sneaked into the Voord base and met the future CyberController. Jamie sacrificed himself, aging to death to destroy the Worldshaper. Time accelerated so that geological processes occurred in front of the Doctor’s eyes. The effect died down, and the Doctor emerged from the TARDIS to find a group of Time Lords present.

Marinus had become Mondas. The Doctor lobbied for the Cybermen to be prevented from coming into being, but the Time Lords told him things were in hand.

A sect from Mondas, the Faction, believed in total conversion into cyborgs. They were at odds with the mainstream, who viewed the technology as a last resort. The Faction left Mondas for Planet 14.
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? - Spare Parts
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The fifth Doctor and Nyssa arrived on Mondas when it was at the furthest point in its journey away from the Sun, on the edge of the Cherrybowl Nebula, “a crucible of unstable energy”. Civilisation survived under the surface of the planet. Mondas was rife with diseases like TB, and “heartboxes” were common for cardiovascular problems. Mondas was ruled by a bionic group mind, the Committee, who were building Cybermen capable of working on the desolate surface of Mondas. The Cybermen were engineering a propulsion system to deflect Mondas away from the Nebula.

A scan of a tertiary lobe in the Doctor’s brain suggested solutions to various organ rejection problems that had plagued the planet’s Cyber-program, and the Cyber-templates were augmented with this new design. The Doctor realised he could do little to prevent history from unfurling as planned.

During the Miocene Era, around twenty-five million years ago, the rocks on which Atlantis would later be built were formed.
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Certain minerals that caused blue grass to grow would not be present in Wales for twenty million years.
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Twenty million years ago on Earth, Creodonts - a cross between a hyena and a bear, and the largest mammalian predators ever to walk the planet - went extinct.
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The Origins of Man

It’s unclear when humanity evolved, and it depends on one’s definition of humanity. Some estimates have men walking the Earth six million years ago. The scientific consensus in the 1970s was about four million.
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The Osirians helped a race of giant insects to build a civilisation on Mars, but became bored with them. The insects died out as other forces emerged on Mars.
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Twelve million years ago, on a nameless planet in our solar system that no longer exists, evolution went up a blind alley. Natural selection turned back on itself, and a creature - the Fendahl - evolved which prospered by absorbing the energy wavelengths of life itself. It consumed all life, including that of its own kind.

The Time Lords decided to destroy the entire planet, and hid the fact from posterity. But when the Time Lords acted it was too late, as the Fendahl had already reached Earth, probably taking in Mars on its way through. The Fendahl was buried, not killed. The energy amassed by the Fendahl was stored in a fossilised skull, and dissipated slowly as a biological transmutation field. Any appropriate life form that came within the field was altered so it ultimately evolved into something suitable for the Fendahl to use. The skull did not create man, but it may have affected his evolution. This would explain the dark side of man’s nature.
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The Doctor visited Mars before it became a dead world.
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c 12,000,000 BC - The Taking of Planet 5
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A Celestis outcast became concerned that the Celestis base of Mictlan might attract the Swimmers - beings large enough to crush the universe. The outcast hoped to destroy Mictlan before this occurred.

Using a Fictional Generator, the outcast brought the Elder Things from HP Lovecraft’s work to life in Antarctica. This attracted Time Lord shock troops from the future, who slaughtered the Elder Things and subsequently readied a fleet of War-TARDISes. They intended to break the time-loop around Planet Five, hoping to use the Fendahl trapped within against the Time Lords’ future Enemy.

A wounded TARDIS created a time fissure that would later be exploited by Professor Fendelman. The time-loop was breached, but this actually released the hyper-evolved Fendahl Predator: a Memeovore, capable of consuming conceptual thought. The Memeovore consumed Mictlan, and thus destroyed the Celestis, before the eighth Doctor banished it to the outer voids.

By now, the planets Delphon and Tersurus had developed their unique forms of communication.

The first true human became aware of herself and immediately developed a sense of self-doubt. The Scourge had established themselves in our universe.
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It was believed that the 001 variant of Amethyst icosahedral plasmic virus No. 9007/41 came to reside in humanity during mankind’s earliest evolution. Each human possessed one dormant particle of the virus, and passed it to their offspring.
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The owl evolved on Earth around this time.
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Ten million years ago, a derelict primitive TARDIS from the war against the Vampires began orbiting the planet Clytemnestra. Human colonists from the Earth Empire of the thirtieth century would mistake it for a moon, and name it Cassandra.
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The Vo’lach feared that as the universe was constantly expanding, its matter would one day be exhausted. They constructed the Spire - a tower that would extract matter from the future and deposit it into the past - to prolong the universe’s lifespan. From the moment of its activation, the Spire was a temporal paradox: if too successful, it would rob the Vo’lach of the motivation to build it in the first place. Two Planetcracker missiles came back in time from the twenty-sixth century and resolved the paradox by damaging the Spire, reducing its efficiency.

Upon finding that the missiles were of Vo’lach design, the Vo’lach became alarmed that their descendents were conquerors. Rather than let this occur, the Vo’lach committed mass suicide.
 [219]

The Carnash Coi, monstrous entities from a distant galaxy, conquered Earth six million years ago. Their violent empire self-destructed, and one of their citadels submerged itself off the coast of what would become Alaska. The Carnash Coi within slept, dreaming of future conquests.
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The people of Trion were so horrified by an infestation of Tractators, it became embedded in their race memory.
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Five million years ago on Earth, the climate of Antarctica was tropical.
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Millions of years ago, an advanced civilisation on Betrushia built an organic catalyzer to test species for survival traits. The catalyzer exceeded its design and threatened all life it encountered, causing the inhabitants to build an artificial ring system that constrained the creature to Betrushia.
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The people of Kirbili wiped themselves out millions of years ago.
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Millions of years ago, the neighbouring worlds of Janus Prime and Menda - respectively inhabited by giant spiders and a race of humanoids - ended a war. They agreed to build a doomsday device as a deterrent against further hostilities, and constructed a device that, if needed, would move a moon of Janus Prime and a moon of Menda into parallel orbit around the Janus system’s sun. A hyperspace link between the two moons would then turn the sun into a black hole. The spiders wiped out the Menda humanoids anyway, but not before the Mendans seeded Janus Prime with isotope decay bombs. This made the spiders devolve into savagery, leaving the doomsday device untouched until 2211.
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By the time of the Pliocene on Earth, the Martian civilisation equivalent of the Industrial Revolution had already taken place.
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c 3,639,878 BC - Genocide
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A group of Tractites arrived from the future using a time tree. They established a colony on Earth, which threatened to wipe out humanity and give rise to a future where the Tractites controlled the planet. The eighth Doctor, aided by Jo Grant and Samantha Jones, tried to prevent this. Jo obliterated the Tractites and their colony with a laser cannon, preventing the aberrant future. The Doctor’s Tractite ally Kitig stayed in this period to carve messages in rock for Jo and Sam to find 1.07 million years hence. At the end of his life, Kitig travelled back in time to destroy the time tree.