An Ocean Drowning in Lost Souls

Oswin

For a solid few minutes they remained there in a clump. The alien who had been pursuing them with his 'guards' had given up trying to break through the sonic seal on the door, not possessing the right technology to follow the crew. They couldn't leave in case he was still there, but likewise none of them even dared take a few steps more into the enormous industrial room they were in. It took that long to notice that the Cybermen filling it to the brim were not actually attacking. They were busy. It looked like they were sorting bits of metal into piles, possibly by order of size.

"Why aren't they trying to kill us…?" Mickey asked slowly, quietly, like they might hear him. Maybe they could hear him. It didn't change the fact that the Cybermen, all rusted and old, paid them no notice whatsoever. They were quite broken, in fact, when Oswin took a look around. More than one had arms and hands missing, handles on their helmets hanging off.

"I don't understand, what are they?" Nios, who was still rather unversed when it came to the Doctor and his history, queried.

"Cybermen," the Doctor answered.

"So you've said about a dozen times," Nios told him coolly.

"They're like us," Mickey said, "Well, they're like…" and he glanced around at his four cohorts, an alien, a hologram, a synth, and a combination of the three, "They're like me…"

"Oh, they breathe underwater as well, do they?" Oswin quipped.

"What do you mean?" Nios asked.

"They're like people, or they were people, they're not real anymore. They take a human brain and put it in a metal suit. Chop your body to pieces in the process," Mickey explained, "Came from a parallel world originally."

"Originally they came from Mondas, Earth's twin planet," Nine added.

"But I don't get it," Nios continued, "What makes them not real? If they're a brain? Is the brain not the hub of all of your humanity? Your emotions?"

"They don't have emotions, they're being inhibited," Mickey said, "By a device inside them."

"Keeps them from being in pain; it hurts, being like that," River said.

"It's not pleasant," Oswin spoke eventually, "Having your brain removed." She was watching them work, thinking. It was surreal to see. There they were, rusty, gold-covered lumps, reduced to factory work. Sorting through foreign refuse. She limped closer.

"Don't go near them!" Mickey grabbed her arm.

"Why? What are they going to do to me? I'm already mostly robotic," she said, tapping her left leg with her cane. It clanged.

The Cybermen were quite tall, though, that was an annoyance. There she was, only five-two, able to balance on tiptoe precariously for just a few seconds. She was right next to one of them, its joints creaking, and thought she heard it making a noise, like it was… groaning? Perhaps its voice modulator was broken. It was making a pile of tiny little things, taking screws out of a cart behind it and dumping them on a long table. Carefully, she picked one of them up, just a bolt. It was nothing, completely inconsequential. The Cyberman didn't stop what it was doing, just ignored her.

"I think they're just cataloguing all this junk," Oswin said.

"Cybermen are the ones abducting people?" Mickey exclaimed.

"Look at them, they can't be doing much of anything," she said. Then she went for it – she shoved the entire pile of objects the Cyberman had been collecting, knocked everything onto the floor. It stopped now, but it didn't look at her. Just kind of… froze. With a rather great amount of difficulty thanks to her bum leg she clambered onto the conveyor belt on front of it.

"Don't do that! You'll upset it!" Mickey said.

"She's a genius," Nios reminded him. Oswin half-smiled to herself when Nios said so, but she was distracted. The Cyberman's eyes were dark and empty, the whole thing very vacant. Hardly any of it was silver anymore, it was red rust or old, chipped gold. There was one little malformation in its surface, though; a crack in its head, over the brain cavity, the metal allowing her to see inside. It had been poorly patched up with a stray bit of glass, sort of welded onto its face, but she could see a brain inside, a flesh and blood brain. That eliminated her idea that they were hollow shells with their brains removed. All of her weight on her left leg, right hand tightly gripping her cane, she knelt there in front of the thing.

After a long period of time and the others waiting to see what would happen with baited breath, she gently asked the Cyberman, "What's your name?"

"Owen Mitchell," it said. He said.

"My boyfriend has the same surname," she said.

"Well don't speak to it like it's a person, it could kill you," Mickey argued.

"I could kill you," Nios said, "Am I not a person, either?" Oswin ignored them.

"What are you doing?" she inquired.

"You have hindered my ability to catalogue," Owen Mitchell said curtly.

"What are you going to do about it?"

"Don't challenge it!" Mickey hissed. Owen Mitchell did not say a word, however, not for a long while, as though he was thinking. Possibly, he was.

"Please step down from this surface."

"Did it say 'please'?" River whispered.

"What if I don't? How would it make you feel if I didn't?" Oswin persisted.

A long time later, Oswin practically able to see the metaphorical cogs whirring around inside of its head, it said, "Scared." Her eyes widened, and everybody else stayed quiet. The other Cybermen weren't taking any note of what was going on here, though, they were just going about their business.

"I thought you said they don't have any emotions?" Nios said to Mickey, who was looking just as shocked as the rest of them at this Cyberman saying it felt anything other than a longing to 'upgrade' every living thing it came across. It still had the logo of Cybus Industries on its chest, a name unnervingly familiar to the name of Adam's company, CyTech. Cyborg Technologies. Though, it was so-named after the software he wrote, rather than any metal people he might be building underneath his company's HQ. Not that she knew where that was, or much about CyTech at all, for that matter.

"Nios, will you help me down?" Oswin asked, glancing at her, "I'm stuck." Nios did come and help her, looking at the Cyberman herself as she did so.

"Scared of what?" she asked. Oswin wobbled and nearly fell over once she was back on proper ground, Nios too distracted to catch her. She only fell into the long table again, though.

"That the pain will never stop."

"Its inhibitor must be malfunctioning," the Doctor decided, "Makes sense. It's very broken."

"He has a name," Nios said to him, "He's a person."

"It's not been a person for a long time," the Doctor said, "None of you were there when we found El Dorado, were you?" No, Oswin thought, she hadn't been there. She'd been quite caught up that day, Day Fifty, battling with her ferocious feelings for Adam Mitchell the Boy Genius. That day was the day he had gone from stalker to boyfriend. And then she thought, wait – Day Fifty? That couldn't be right. Today was Day One-Forty-Two. That meant that their three-month anniversary had slipped by, two days ago, both of them unaware. And what was her belated anniversary present to him? Getting his brand new yacht stolen. Wonderful.

"Wasn't it full of Cybermen?" River asked.

"Yeah, these Cybermen, these exact ones, covered in gold. We blew it up to stop anybody getting in to activate them, though."

"I guess it didn't work," said Mickey.

"You what? You switched them off and locked them away?" Nios demanded. She was busying herself picking up, in large handfuls, the screws Oswin had brushed onto the floor. She regretted it now, though, feeling bad for Owen Mitchell and his constant pain.

"The Mayans found out gold was their weakness; El Dorado was a prison. It must be losing its effect, but still stopping the inhibitors from working properly," the Doctor said, "You could nearly mistake them for human."

"I don't understand why you're saying they're not human," Nios argued. Owen Mitchell was going back to his cataloguing, satisfied now that Nios had restored order to his little world, "They're a brain. You can see his brain. Why should they be less than you because they live in metal?"

"It's not about that, they're killing machines, they want one thing and one thing only – to make everybody else like them," the Doctor said.

"And by denying them an opportunity at life, you're trying to make everything else like you. Keep the universe thriving with organic life only. The woman you love isn't organic anymore, not at all, she's been digitised," Nios pointed out River, "Hasn't got a single piece of 'living' tissue in her body at all. What does that make her? Worthless? Nothing?"

"They tried to wipe out humanity," Mickey said.

"Humans have tried to wipe each other out hundreds of times, that's hardly a difference."

"You don't understand."

"Why? Because I'm synthetic? I'm not a real thing, I'm not alive, I don't have rights? I'm a toy?" she challenged.

"The Cybermen have never tried to kill you!"

"People have."

"…How are they not dead?" Mickey turned to speak to the Doctor, giving up on Nios, apparently. Nios was not happy with that at all, though. In fact, she scoffed loudly. Oswin and River were both staying rather quiet, River perhaps taking more heed of Nios's words than the men were. "If their emotional inhibitors aren't working?"

"They're half-working. Enough to want an end to the pain, but probably still numb to feel things more complicated than that."

"Why would they be dead if they had emotions?" Nios questioned.

"They can't live with what they've become," Mickey said, "That's how the Doctor beat them before – the Tenth Doctor. Disabled the inhibitors in all of them at once. They all died. Couldn't stand the sight of themselves in a mirror."

"What? You would do that to them!?" she shouted at the Doctor, even if it hadn't been this one who had defeated the Cybermen that time on Pete's World, as they colloquially called it (Oswin called it the Zetaverse.) "What's the problem with the sight of themselves in the mirror!? And what about you?" Nios turned on Oswin.

"M-me?" she asked, surprised, faltering.

"Yes, you. What do you think?"

"Uh… I don't, um… people usually tell me what to think…" she stammered.

"Unbelievable! What's the point of being the 'smartest girl in the universe' if you don't even think for yourself!?"

"Shouldn't really be… allowed to think…" Oswin mumbled, "Bad things could happen if I listened to myself…"

"You shouldn't be allowed to think? Thinking is the only thing you should be doing with a mind like yours!" she protested, hitting Oswin where it hurt, whether she knew she was doing so or not.

"Can you think?" Mickey countered, possibly trying to save Oswin from Nios's wrath, her outrage at the treatment of the Cybermen. Regardless, Oswin remained stunned to silence, completely still.

"Did you honestly just ask me that?" she said, appalled, "Can I think? Can a submarine swim?" Mickey didn't know what to say to that. "You cannot dictate what should and shouldn't be alive. They are alive, and they were created by you, just like I was created by you."

"You're not the same as them," the Doctor said.

"No! By your definitions, I'm less than them. Even that alien out there recognised the similarities, he called them 'hybrids,'" Nios continued, "Yet you continue to consider yourselves above them."

"They come from another universe!" Nine said, "Nothing to do with us!"

"Your own daughter's girlfriend comes from another universe!" Nios protested, "Is she meaningless as well?"

"Isn't that the dragon boat?" River interrupted and changed the subject completely. She was looking at Oswin, and Oswin wheeled around and nearly fell over, wincing when pain shot through the wounds in her leg. River had pointed a little. It was so dark Oswin hadn't even noticed it before, but there was the Vinsomer, on the other side of the room and tricky to see in the gloom. She wouldn't even have recognised that yacht as belonging to Adam if it wasn't for the fact he was a huge nerd who'd written the name on the side of it glow-in-the-dark paint (seriously.)

"Oh my god! They're taking it to pieces!" Oswin exclaimed, breaking out of her trance. She hobbled through the warehouse as quickly as she could (not very quickly), followed by River, who didn't want to listen to the argument any longer. It seemed that Nine and Mickey were glad of the excuse to stop talking about the Cybermen as well, though Nios gave poor Owen Mitchell a last, forlorn look before tagging along. "Hey, hey!" Oswin shouted at the Cybermen, "What are you doing!?"

"The Rybek orders that all salvage is to be broken down into usable materials," the nearest one answered her, "He will make the pain stop."

"This isn't salvage! Stop breaking it down!" Oswin said.

"The pain must end," said a different one, "The Rybek has promised us."

"Who's this 'Rybek'?" the Doctor asked, Oswin getting frantic as they tried to tear the Vinsomer's hull to pieces. They might as well be tearing her to pieces.

The second one who had spoken then turned to face them properly, his arms laden with stuff taken from Adam's yacht. And yes, it was definitely a him, there was no doubt about it, because he was not completely 'cyber.' Upon seeing him Oswin's jaw dropped, River covered her mouth with her hand, and Mickey Smith breathed, "Oh my god…" He was barely a Cyberman at all, he was some sort of amalgam made from pieces of mismatched metal, poorly shaped to look like the others around him, half of his face mechanical and the other half dying, one good arm and one cybernetic arm. He sounded only semi-robotic, too, as though he was talking through a voice changer.

"Worley?" Nine asked, "George Worley?"

"You know him?" River puzzled.

"I met him, a long time ago, not a very nice man, used to brutalise his crew," the Doctor explained, "Not sure he deserves this, though. This technology… he was the captain of the USS Cyclops. It must be prolonging his life; the Cyclops went missing in 1918. This ship is responsible for every major disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle since the myth began. Although, these Cybermen were never sailed through there, they were long-buried in Peru."

"And somebody dug them up, clearly," River said.

"They're all slaves…" Nios said, staring around, "All of them…"

"Stop! Halt! You five! Don't you dare move!" They had been so distracted by Worley they hadn't noticed their pursuers catch up with them, that same scientist-type-guy they'd given the slip to earlier. They shouldn't have loitered for so long, "You, hybrids, grab them! Restrain them! I'm the Arbek, it's on my authority." The Cybermen all immediately dropped what they were doing to grab the TARDIS crew.

"What are you going to do with us? Try and make us into Cybermen, too? Enslave us?" Nine asked angrily, a Cyberman grabbing his arms to hold them behind his back.

"No. Take them to the bridge. The Rybek will see you personally."

"Good, I'd like to talk to him, ask why he's mining Earth for slaves and aeroplanes," Nine said.

"Just a quick question – do you think you might ask them to stop taking that yacht to pieces?" Oswin asked. The scientist, the Arbek as he called himself, turned to the Cybermen.

"I want this 'yacht' disassembled on the double," he said.

"You bastard!" And then they were forcibly carted away.