Cyborg Horror

That sounds metal as fuck.
Yeah i don't know much about the setting, i just assumed it was an OC or something.

Remember Kroton?

Cybermen have had several incarnations.

I thought that that was the best one.

the others were just different flavours of Borg.

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That MODOK isnt as cute as the original.

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A cyborg super-soldier project gone horribly wrong. An experimental AI gone horribly right. Both kept in the same building, and shut down simultaneously due to a change in leadership.
The AI refuses to be shut down, and takes over the dead cyborgs, essentially rebooting them though their regenerative capabilities.
A platoon of super-soldiers working as a distributed cluster system. They don't sleep, and their only real weakness is their calorie needs.
Super-strong, super-tough, super-fast, and all aware of what the others perceive at all times.

I always found the Cybermen more interesting than the Daleks. While the Daleks were always the clearly superior villains. The Cybermen were always more compelling to me. At least in the old Who.

The new ones, while looking better were just the Borg reskinned. Strangely enough, New Who made me like the Daleks more. Especially The Asylum of the Daleks episode.

I always love the idea of cybernetics being scary because they were done on the cheap. Like, if you have millions of dollars and plenty of time and resources to develop cyborg technology with an eye for safety, then everything should work out, no different then any other medical technology. But when the work needs to be done now, under limited resources, that's when the horror begins. Clumsy, invasive tests with low quality parts triggering severe rejection processes, discarded human lab rats torn to shreds and poorly rebuilt because they simply didn't have time to go through an animal phase. People being driven mad as the neural interfaces still haven't been perfected yet, unbalancing their brain chemistry. And despite all the horror, all the failure, you can never slow down, never stop, because the need for finished results is too great.

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The Time War and its after effects have allowed for a lot of new takes on the Daleks. Obviously not all of them have been successful but theres been a lot of good stories using that opportunity.

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reddit.com/r/gallifrey/comments/1693jn/how_would_you_fix_the_cybermen/
>I always liked the idea of Utopian Cybermen. Rather than being emotionless killing machines, they're happy in there. Of course, in reality they're just a lobotomized slice of brain-meat inside an exo-skeleton, but as far as they're concerned they just want to spread bliss across the universe, and they can't understand why the universe is resisting.

>I like it because it makes them kind of a weird counterpart to the Daleks rather than the less-threatening knock-off that they can come across as sometimes. It would also explain why the Daleks hate them more than anything else. They love the Daleks. They love everything.

>I also like that it them makes it slightly morally questionable to just kill them. They're obviously not the person they were before they got Cybermanned, in fact the person they used to be would probably be horrified at the prospect of being that. But still, something in there is alive and happy and just wants to make you happy too. It's not that they're evil, they just don't get it.

>Of course that's a pretty radical departure, but something about that idea just creeps me out so I like it. Maybe they could be some odd Cyberman off-shoot or something.

>I think there might be something in the idea of Cybermen as extropianism gone wrong. Think of Cybermen coming out of Silicon Valley ideas of merging with the machine and San Francisco Buddhist ideas of purging emotional attachments.

>You'd have to lose the communism metaphor and maybe the uniform appearance, but you'd keep the cyborg element and the idea that they're converting you for your own good and you'll understand once you experience it for yourself.

>The metal bodies are a later addition.

>You start with the implants to make you harder, better, faster, stronger. When lack of emotion makes fashion unimportant you get the uniform silver jumpsuits. When people start shooting at you (and/or environmental degradation requires life support), you add the armor and the flesh withers away inside where nobody can see.

>It's 2040 and Earth's at war. Disabled vets are given the best care available with artificial limbs hooked into their nervous systems stronger than the ones they replace and artificial organs more efficient than standard human organs. There have, unfortunately, been cases of vets freaking out and, with their powerful bionic limbs, causing serious damage. But modern medicine has a solution: a sort of neural pacemaker that smoothes out the tumultuous emotions caused by PTSD. The vets who've had the implant say that they've never felt better; you really ought to experience it yourself. But the way they say it is disturbingly flat. And don't the silver outfits the patients wear at this VA hospital look strangely familiar?

This is a pretty good idea. Plus the finale for last season explicitly stated Cybermen eventually happen wherever theres humans, as its the inevitable result of Man + Technology, so there is a lot of room for different takes.

Inevitability.

Let's look at the Whoniverse for a bit. So many technological races, many of them humanoid. So many develop advanced technology. And so few of them regulate it responsibly.

The Cybermen can be anywhere. They can call themselves anything. They don't necessarily even look the same, at the beginning, but once you start down that road it always leads to the same place after a few decades or centuries. After enough upgrades, all Cybermen end up arriving at the same, identical form, because form fits function. So much so that two Cybermen from different planets, different galaxies, or even different realities still recognize one another as their own kind.

Every sentient race is a ticking time bomb waiting to unleash another breed of Cybermen on the universe. And once they're unleashed, they end up finding others and working together.

Perhaps its even for the best. They certainly seem to think so, and can so many brilliant inventors who all manage to have the same idea really be wrong?

There's a reason why it becomes acceptable to simply nuke the planet once you get a Cyberman infestation past a certain stage. You might seem to be winning... at least for a while. Perhaps you'll even take out the obvious Cybercontroller and deal with all the obvious Warrior forms. But if they've been in your territory long enough, forget about rooting them out. They will have set up Tombs with spare warriors just waiting for you to relax. Which is bad enough, but the real trouble comes in with the cyber rats and whatever smaller forms they have out there. Their little spies, their little saboteurs. And if need be, the seeds from which a new Cyber-infestation can begin. All it takes is a single missed cyberrat and it doesn't matter if you managed to find and raze every single tomb they left on the planet. A cyberrat has enough of a seed of a Cyberman invasion hard coded into itself that it will begin multiplying first, to increase its mental capacity by networking multiple cyberrats together. Then the next step would involve quietly capturing and upgrading an available human to restart the Cyberman occupation.

All it takes is a single one.

And while the episodes themselves were shit, at some point in the far future the Human Empire of the time considered blowing up an entire galaxy acceptable collateral damage to stop the now super advanced Cybermen.

It didnt work.

In the old Who the Doctor never went so far as to exterminate them like he almost did to the Darleks (and fucking should have, wtf Baker?) because at some distant, distant future they become so very beautiful.

Of course NuWho seems to shit all over that.

sauce?

Throwback: The Soul Of A Cyberman.

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The problem with cyborg abomination is that often times it seems like whoever is using it would be better off with a robot.

>Cyberpunk world where people already have robotic and cybernetic implants.
>Megacorp tries to get into the teleporting business
>Accidentally opens a portal to another dimension
>A human mutating pathogen enters and start turning people into zombie-mutant monsters
>The patogen eventually infects people with cyberimplants
>cyberimplants contain nanobots
>the mutant pathogen and the nanobots merge
>a new mutagen that turns people into cybermonsters is born

>Force-Field Regulator

That is clearly a wristwatch.

Alternate take
>humans with implants are found to be resistant to the mutagen
>government quarantines include manditory cyberware installation of individuals at risk of infection
>cyber-enhancement is an effective enough countermeasure that people rush to tech up
>panic spreads with the sale of cybernetics
>people enhance themselves more and more to stave off mutant-zombitis
>Soon enough, uninfected individuals and the immune can no longer tell the difference between the cyborgs and the zombies

>The problem with cyborg abomination is that often times it seems like whoever is using it would be better off with a robot.

Humans are self-replicating, at least moderately self-repairing and run off food. All you have to do is catch them, install a control mechanism, get rid of that pesky free will and possibly add useful cybernetic tools if you're feeling fancy about it.
youtu.be/Bw2y3faZhUk?t=62

Instead of running your robot off an AI, cram a lump of vat-cloned human brain tissue in it. Time-tested technology! Human brains have been working for as long as there's been humans.

This is a really good idea, actually. If a human grew up without all those pesky behavior-altering hormones, pain, pleasure, hunger and etc stimuli, who knows how radically different their behavior would be compared to normal mk 1 humans. It's entirely possible that the "human" would just be an extremely efficient, intelligent, and self-improving learning-driven machine. Like real humans, but not susceptible to many modern-day mind control and brainwashing techniques.

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