Do you ever suddenly realise that you don’t actually know the meaning of a word that you’ve blithely used most of your life? That happened to me recently, when I was reading an article on the Cybermen in ‘The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who’ (by Simon Guerrier and Dr Marek Kukula), in which they talk about cybernetics and cyborgs. The dictionary definition of the word ‘cybernetics’ is:
‘The scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine’
It is derived from the Greek – meaning to steer, control or govern. In science it runs across a large number of fields of study, in areas such as feedback, communications and control systems – both organic and machine. So, a very much broader definition than the use of the word (first coined in 1948) in science fiction, where it seems to be largely used interchangeably with the term ‘Cyborg’ – a contraction of ‘Cybernetic Organism’. The Cybermen aren’t initially referred to as such (the phrase was coined in 1960, only 6 years before ‘the Tenth Planet’), but the definition matches them:
A being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts
‘A cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one’
This last definition is taken from research that Clynes & Kline did in the 1960’s on the subject of augmenting humans to better withstand the rigors of space flight. This is something that feeds directly into the conception of the Cybermen in ‘Spare Parts’, where the work crews are augmented to allow them to work in space, well at least on the surface of Mondas – which amounts to the same thing.
The term cyborg then, could theoretically encompass anything from someone with a pacemaker or hearing aid fitted internally, all the way through to the horrors of full cyber-conversion. So, is it then at least partially a question of scale? I mean, no one would call someone with basic technology to help them stay alive or improve a medical condition, a ‘cyborg’, someone with prosthetic limbs for example or a heart or insulin monitor. So, where do you draw the line – when does it become more than a few ‘spare parts’ and venture into something that could potentially be judged as morally wrong? When is the ethical line crossed and you stop being human? How about the argument around keeping someone artificially alive for long periods of time through machinery? We do this now? What happens on Mondas is an extension of this in some ways. What is ethical, don’t we all deserve a chance to live? However, what if the flip side of that is what if being kept artificially alive by machines means that your life is hell? How far do you go for survival?
These are the sort of questions that Dr Kit Pedler – a scientist in the ophthalmology department of the University of London, specializing in the retina of the human eye, asked in 1966, as his starting point for imagining the Cybermen. This was at the very beginning of organ replacement surgery – the first heart transplant was a year later at the end of 1967. It was also right at the start of an electronics revolution and the beginnings of commercial computing. In other words, it was exactly the right time to start thinking about these questions concerning the relationship between man and machine and it was exactly the reason why Kit Pedler was brought in as the show’s scientific advisor – to generate ideas that stories could be based on. He had already explored machine intelligence and communication in ‘The War Machines’ and he would go on to explore the ethics of scientific developments and experimentation, again with Gerry Davies, in the series ‘Doomwatch’ in which scientists in a government watchdog investigated potential threats from such sources. Watching that series today is largely an exercise in ‘I told you so’.
So, to my mind there are five main aspects to the Cybermen:
- Their role as an all-purpose foe for the Doctor. Marching silver/steel robot men that smash through doors or bend rifles, that want to kill you or convert you so that you become like them. This is the main part which appeals to us as children – the big scary robot aspect, with plenty of scope for explosions and horror.
- Their design. This changes an awful lot over the years, but they still maintain some common design features in most versions – the chest unit (absent from the Cybus ones), the blank face mask, circular eye holes with a tear drop in the corner (almost a signifier of the pathos of their condition), the control piping down the arms and legs. The mask and handles are so distinctive that even a helmet in a museum in ‘Dalek’ or an ‘Invasion’ era head from ‘Death in Heaven’ cause waves of nostalgia.
- Their uniformity of appearance (at least usually within a given story – as discussed, their costumes and voices vary considerably over the years) and thought. This is a conscious echo (I think) of the massed matching ranks of Nazis, or the Red Army. Marching in unison, all individuality subsumed to a common purpose.
- The deliberately blank face masks contribute to this.
- The body horror of the conversion process itself.
- The loss of self, memory and emotion as a result of the conversion process.
The latter two aspects of the Cybermen are worth exploring further I think.
The body horror of conversion – the saws and hypodermic needles, the leftovers at the end of the surgical procedure is something unique to the Cybermen. This is something of a primal fear in us – of operations and surgery gone wrong. The conversion process is an aspect barely explored in the original run of the show – we have scenes in ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’ (Toberman) and ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ (Lytton), but I am struggling to think of other instances where this is mined. ‘Spare Parts’ obviously features this – we hear, but not see obviously, the conversion process as it happens. Again, this is picked up in ‘Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel’ and later ‘Doomsday’ and we see the slashing blades and hypodermic needles ready for action and the screams during conversion. It is picked up again, with direct links to hospital and surgery, like ‘Spare Parts’, in ‘World Enough and Time’ – Bill’s arse literally left in a hospital bin. So, whilst it is an interesting and horrific aspect to the Cybermen, since it was so little used in the 1960’s, it isn’t obviously a pre-requisite for their initial success.
In some ways, the other more chilling side of conversion, is what is done to the ‘self’. These aren’t just humans in a chrome suit, cybernetically controlling it, like Marvel’s ‘Iron Man’. These are people who have also had their memories and emotions – their soul surgically removed or at least suppressed. You have to ask, what is really left of these walking cadavers? Kit Pedler originally pitched a story about vampires (after his idea concerning ‘star monks’ was rejected), but in some ways this is similar to what the Cybermen are – the undead who will convert you to be like them. In ‘Spare Parts’ the programming stage of the conversion process stops the converted from going mad, either at the horrors that have been perpetrated on them or in order to survive the frozen, airless surface of Mondas, staring out across the black sky and into the fires of the Cherrybowl Nebula. In ‘The Age of Steel’, we have a piece of typical piece Russell storytelling – the emotional inhibitor – something which fixes this for you, stops you feeling anything. You are still in there, as are your memories and your feelings for loved ones, just suppressed by technology. It is something that recurs in Danny Pink’s story in ‘Death in Heaven’ when he implores Clara to turn his inhibitor on, so he can forget about the pain and loss:
CLARA: Danny?
DANNY: Danny Pink is dead. Help me.
CLARA: Oh, my God. Danny
DANNY: Help me.
CLARA: Danny, I am so sorry.
DANNY: Help me. I need you to do something for me. I can’t do it myself.
CLARA: What is that?
DANNY: It’s an inhibitor. It’s not activated. I need you to switch it on.
CLARA: What does it inhibit?
DANNY: Emotion. It deletes emotions. Please. I don’t want to feel like this.
DOCTOR: Danny’s dead, Clara.
CLARA: Not yet.
CLARA: Not quite. But he wants to be
CLARA: It’s in his chest. He says it’s an inhibitor. It can delete emotion or something.
DOCTOR: I know what it does. If you turn it on, he’ll become a Cyberman.
CLARA: He’s already a Cyberman
DOCTOR: Not yet, he isn’t.
CLARA: I feel like I’m killing you.
DANNY: I’m already dead. You’re here this time at least.
CLARA: Goodbye, Danny.
DANNY: Goodbye, Clara.
In my dislike of certain aspects of this story, I had completely missed this, the most important part of it – somehow it reads much better on the page than it does on screen. In the same way that Yvonne or Sally or Bill aren’t really Cybermen, as they have not yet had their emotions or ‘self’ inhibited by programming or through an ‘off switch’, Danny is still Danny until Clara ‘turns him off’. It is as much a key aspect of the Cybermen, as the conversion process itself – one removes the physical aspect that identifies you to yourself and others – your face replaced by a blank mask, for example or lack of body language, the other aspect removes everything else – memories, love, empathy, a sense of humour, fun, passion, desires, dislikes and fears.
I wonder if so many later stories return to this aspect of the Cybermen – the lack of emotions, because of a generation of writers who read the Doctor Who Weekly comic strips featuring Kroton – the Cyberman who still had emotions and memories and was a force for good? As a youngster, I always felt that those stories were full of pathos and sadness at the predicament of a likeable character, physically changed beyond recognition, but still with his memories of love and his life before conversion. Thinking about it, those strips made a big impression on me, such that this aspect seems such an obvious one to explore in the series. It certainly fits into the new series (and Big Finish for that matter) increased focus on the more emotional side of the dramatic opportunities available to a sci-fi action adventure series.
Testing what it is to be human
So, what do the Cybermen say about what it means to be human? Again, I have been thinking about this recently. I’d watched ‘Blade Runner’ (first time for my partner) and it set me thinking about the ‘Turing Test’. This a test that Alan Turing devised to answer the question ‘can machines think’, the test sets out to evaluate whether an AI is distinguishable from a human via communication. In this test, the evaluator is separated from the test subject and so cannot see them or their body language and the medium of communication is text only.
In ‘Blade Runner’, the replicants are androids not cyborgs, built by human engineers. Built to look human, act like humans, with implanted real human memories (Rachel has been provided with the memories of another human’s childhood), but with a copyrighted design and an end of life date built in. They would pass the Turing Test, certainly some characters in the film interact with the replicants face to face, without knowing whether they are human or not. However, in the film there is a psychological test devised to determine if someone is a replicant or human, through a series of questions designed to provoke an emotional response – the Voight-Kampff test. Subjects are monitored for changes in respiration, heart rate, blush response etc. as the questions are asked. As the replicants look human and can communicate well enough to easily pass ‘The Turing Test’, the tests used in ‘Blade Runner’ require face to face questioning and monitoring of response. In devising these sorts of tests, you are essentially asking some pretty fundamental questions around what it is to be human and what separates us from machine intelligences.
So, what about if you work in the opposite direction from the replicants/androids in ‘Blade Runner’? Take a human and technologically augment them as a Cyberman? Well there is no doubt that Danny Pink would have passed the Turing test in the scenes quoted above, probably the Voight-Kampff test as well, but would he after the inhibitor was activated? I don’t think so, even though behind the mask we see his face and a certain amount of the organic Danny Pink is in there (not a sentence I have ever imagined writing before!), it seems to me that there is no way that any human communicating with a fully converted Cyberman, would mistake it as a fellow human being, even over text communication.
They aren’t a pure AI though, more a human brain augmented with AI or modified to act as an AI. As scientists and IT professionals in the real world, struggle to make AI’s more human and improve their communication skills to be interchangeable with humans, on Mondas they were doing the opposite – making humans into AI’s to avoid the pain of what they have become – switching off what it is to be human. In the process, also developing a horrible sense of superiority over non-augmented humans (not quite to the ‘master race’ levels of the Daleks, more logic than blind hatred or prejudice) and an imperative to convert other humans to Cybermen. To their thinking, they are doing us a favour – releasing us from fear and pain. Their twin objectives are survival and conversion – ‘You will be like us’ – built to survive on a dying world that has wandered too far from its sun.
Ultimately, it isn’t just a question of the cybernetic augmentation, more that their programming or the emotional inhibitor, prevents them from passing the Turing test. Their lack of empathy and emotion, rather like Jacob Rees-Mogg precludes them from the definition of what it is to be human. That, combined with the body horror of conversion is what makes the Cybermen work for me as an adult. In the background though, there are still those big, scary, silver robot men, that I first met as a child in 1974, with their distinctive ‘handle bars’ and teardrops in the corner of their eyes.
A Journal of Impossible Things 