| “ | Cybermen will remove fear. Cybermen will remove sex and class and color and creed. You will become identical, you will become like us. | „ |
| ~ One of the Cybermen. |
The Cybermen are a race of cyborgs from Doctor Who that serve as one of the series' most recurring and dangerous antagonists (rivaling the Daleks in that regard - in fact, the current human-derived Cybermen are in a state of war with said Daleks ever since the Daleks denied them an alliance during an attack on Torchwood).
Personality
All Cybermen are essentially living brains inside a robot body that robs them of emotion and free will. They are programmed to see themselves as a perfect life-form and work to "upgrade" others into more Cybermen, by force if needed. Any life-forms that resist or are incompatible with Cyber technology are to be "deleted".
History
Cybermen from Mondas
The first model Cybermen.
The first Cybermen were originally the people of the planet Mondas, the Tenth Planet of Earth's solar system, who converted themselves to survive when their world was knocked out of solar orbit and drifted into the deep space.
Having installed a drive propulsion system so they could pilot the planet itself, the Cybermen began conquering planets to convert the native life forms into more Cybermen to increase their numbers. The Cybermen first confronted the Second Doctor in the distant future when he came to one of their tombs 5 centuries after Mondas' destruction in 1986.
The Cybermens' chronological first meeting with the Doctor was in 1970 when a group of Cybermen from "Planet 14" use industrialist Tobias Vaughn to paving the way for a ground invasion. However, the Cybermen are forced to retreat due to interfere from Doctor with the aid of the newly formed United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. An advance force of Cybermen set up base in an Antarctic space tracking station in the year 1986 to summon Mondas. However, Mondas' overloaded from draining Earth's energy for the Cybermen's use and ceased to be along with many of the Cybermen. But the Cybermen lingered on as species and confronted the Doctor in several time periods, with him thwarting them.
When Borusa had trapped the five incarnations of the Doctor in the Games of Rassilon, some Cybermen appeared as enemies in the deadly games. They allied the Master, who wanted to lead them to the Dark Tower, but he betrayed them and they were destroyed in one of the tower's traps. Another squad went after the Third Doctor but were all destroyed by a Raston Warrior Robot.
A Cyberman was once among the many creatures that Vorg had in his miniscope.
After the Cybermen were already defeated a long time ago, the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler found a head of a dead Cyberman in Henry Van Statten's museum along with the arm of a Slitheen and other alien artifacts.
Later they allied with the Master once again, who developed a way to convert the deceased into Cybermen. They also gained the ability to fly via rockets built into them. Once a large enough army was raised they invaded London once again. However when the Twelfth Doctor took the control bracelet from the Master (which controlled all the Cybermen) and gave it to a converted Danny Pink who lead all the Cybermen up into the sky where they all simultaneously self destructed.
On an enormous Montasian Colony Ship, which was trapped in the gravitational field of a black hole, the Cybermen rose once again. This was due to time dilation caused from the black hole, which led to 20 crew members, who traveled to the back of the ship to fix the engines, experience time much faster than the front of the same ship. This led to minutes matching years at the two ends. Within two days/thousands, the crew was long gone and their descendants had built an enormous city. Due to pollution, lack of resources and a brutal regime by the The Master, chances of survival were getting slim and a group of Doctors decided to convert the population. It appeared that the Master (now in disguise after being overthrown by the people) was also the key architect in this plan. The converted would eventually become the Cybermen, who would later convert Bill Potts to lethally injure the Twelfth Doctor. The Twelfth Doctor managed to destroy most of the Cybermen in the end, but it appeared that at least some survived.
The Cyber-Wars
An old Cyberman converted into a chess playing machine.
In the year 2526, a force of Cybermen attempted to destroy Earth, first with a Cyber-bomb and then by crashing a human freighter into the Earth, to prevent the alliance who planned to fight them from forming. Both of these attempts were stopped by the Fifth Doctor.
After the war several Cybermen and a few Cybermats survived and tried to destroy the gold planet of Voga to avenge their fallen empire but are stopped by Fourth Doctor.
Thought to have been extinct for centuries, using advanced minuscule Cybermats known as Cybermites to spy and gather parts for them, Cybermen underwent massive upgrades to make them invincible to the point that only a planetary destruction device can be used against a single Cyberman if not dealt with quickly. These enhancements include Cyber-conversion by Cybermites, detaching their limbs, super-fast speed, and the ability to convert non-humanoid life forms as the Eleventh Doctor found out. However the Doctor temporarily immobilizes them which gives enough time for him, Clara, and other human troops to evacuate and destroy the planet they are on.
This model was also present in the siege of Trenzalore, devising one with a wooden exoskeleton armed with a flame thrower to avoid detection. The Eleventh Doctor is able to trick and destroy it by using it's own weapon against it.
The Last of the Cybermen
At the end of the universe, a group of Cybermen living within an asteroid were found by Rassilon after he was banished from Gallifrey. Rassilon saw the potential in allying with the Cybermen and let himself be converted into a Cyber-Leader. With Rassilon's assistance, the Cybermen attacked and conquered Gallifrey, and rewrote history with the Time Lords' technology to keep the Doctor occupied.
In the new timeline, Cyber-Silurians seeded the universe with ark ships containing cyber-technology. The 11th Doctor attempted to stop the launch of the arks, but he was captured and assimilated. After the CyberKings captured the Sontaran cloning worlds and caused the extinction of the Rutan Host, the 10th Doctor was unable to stop an ark from converting Sontar on a planetary scale. The Sontaran cloning factories were then altered by the Cybermen so that they produced an endless supply of Mondasians to convert. Earth was completely taken over by Cybermen in 2006. After Rose Tyler was converted and Jack Harkness was killed, the 9th Doctor tried to destroy the Cybermen. Instead, he was infected with nanobots and cyber-converted.
At the end of the universe, the Cybermen used looms to siphon the regenerative energy from Time Lords into the Eye of Harmony. They planned to use the Eye of Harmony to shape formation of the next universe, making a reality perfectly suited to the Cyberiad. The Twelfth Doctor came to Gallifrey and confronted Rassilon and the Cybermen. When the Doctor was forced into a loom, the Cyber-Controller betrayed Rassilon and put him in a loom as well. The Doctor and Rassilon used their combined willpower to influence the energy being pumped into the Eye of Harmony and instead of regenerating the future, they regenerated the past. Everything the Cybermen had done was reversed and their supremacy over all of time and space was wiped from the memory of the universe.
Human 2.0
The Cybermen created by Cybus Industries in Pete's World.
Ending up in a parallel universe with his companion Rose Tyler and her boyfriend Mickey Smith, the Tenth Doctor finds the parallel Earth to be the genesis of that reality's Cybermen. The product of a dying transhumanist named John Lumic, founder and owner of the multinational company Cybus Industries, these Cybermen were created from the homeless and acted on his will to convert every human into a Cyberman. However, the Doctor and his friends stop the Cybermen by deactivating the emotional inhibitors that keep the Cybermen from going insane. Afterwards, a resistance group, the Preachers, set about to clean up the remainder of Lumic's factories around the world.
However, thanks to the Cult of Skaro, the Cybermen exploit a breach between universes found by Yvonne Hartman to invade London under command of their Cyberleaders. Though the Doctor manages to send the parallel Cybermen into the void, traces of their actions in Canary Wharf remain such as a partially converted Torchwood employee named Lisa Hallett who was killed months later by her follow Torchwood operatives.
The Cyber-Lord
However, due to the actions of the New Dalek Empire, the parallel Cybermen escaped the void and ended up in London 1851, where they enlisted the aid of a human named Mercy Hartigan before they are destroyed for good by the Doctor by sending their giant robot, the "Cyber-King" into the time vortex.
Cybermen of Unknown Origin
At Stonehenge the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond encountered Cybermen whose exact origin was never explained, although resembling John Lumic's Cybermen. They had teamed up with others of the Doctors enemies like the Daleks, the Judoon and the Sontarans to save the universe by trapping the Doctor in the Pandorica. However, they vanished from existance when the TARDIS exploded.
Others of these Cybermen, called the Twelfth Cyber Legion, were visited by the Eleventh Doctor and Rory Williams, when they were searching for Amy Pond, who was imprisoned by Madame Kovarian. Their Cyberleader told Rory her location after the Doctor destroyed some of their spaceships.
Daleks vs. Cybermen A Conversation Between Two Linguistically Gifted Groups
the rivalry between human-derived Cybermen and Daleks begins.
After one of their ships later crashed on Earth in Colchester, they fought the Doctor one more time, when he visited Craig Owens. Like the Cybermen from Mondas, they used Cybermats. They tried to convert Craig into their new Cyber-Controller, but his feelings for his infant son were so strong, that he was able to override to process and blow up their ship.
The Eleventh Doctor and his companion Clara Oswald encountered Cybermen who could upgrade themselves by will but retained the Mondasian Cybermen's weakness to gold. The Doctor got briefly possessed by their Cyber Planner who called itself Mr. Clever.
On the planet Trenzalore, the Doctor encountered a wooden Cyberman that could blast fire and tricked it into destroying itself.
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