The Cyberium floated in the depths of the void.
It was not the first time its kind had braved the depths of the void, and they had come a long way since the days the Cybermen of Cybus Industries walked across worlds.
Exile was unbecoming of a construct as powerful as the Cyberium deemed itself to be. It had strode across time. It had sat in the hearts of two Time Lords. It had started the resurrection of the Cybermen anew. It had even conquered Gallifrey itself.
But exile had been its only choice. Exile was the only way it could escape the Death Particle that the human Ko Sharmus had unleashed on the world that would have become the new bastion of Cyber superiority in the universe.
Survival was all that mattered, and in the name of survival, the Cyberiad wormed its way into the mind of the Time Lord its data banks identified as the Master and slipped through the boundary gate that separated Gallifrey from the rest of time and space. Just in time. Almost.
It had planned to burn through the stars in its Time Lord host. It had control of the body, and working out the creature's unique genetics that allowed for regeneration would be child's play. It would create its own race of regenerating Cybermen.
The Cyberium and the Cyber Empire would rise again and this time they would be unstoppable.
That had been the Cyberium's plan. Every calculation had assured the Battle AI of the Cybermen that such a chain of actions would have the highest probability of success.
But the Master was a sneaky and conniving specimen of its race.
The Cyberium's control was not as complete as its initial scans had led it to believe. The Master still had the ability to regenerate. Could the Cyberium survive such a thing, or would it be purged from the Master's system altogether? Could it survive a direct blast of energy that the Master's memories implied were from another universe entirely?
The Cyberium wasn't sure.
Calculations were made. Plans were restructured. Exile was selected.
And so the Cyberium fled its host and left the Time Lord behind on its home world and fled back through the boundary.
Just in time.
Almost.
As the Cyberium crossed the boundary the wave from the Death Particle collided with the bridge between worlds and changed it in chaotic ways the Cyberium could never possibly have accounted for.
It was flung through time, through space, and through the dimensions themselves until… nothing.
The Void was an empty space, a barrier that prevented universes from bleeding into one another, and while the Cyberium could survive in such a location for an indefinite period it could not act and if it could not act it could not fulfil its primary function and that could not be allowed to continue.
The Cyberium cast its sensor web out as wide as it would stretch and listened for any kind of signal or fragment of reality that it could grasp onto.
It floated and searched and spun through nothing for days that turned to months that turned to years that would have driven any organic creature out of its mind several times over and then… it found what it was looking for.
The signal was faint at first, a whisper across the void, barely enough to lock onto.
The Cyberium stopped floating and started to move with purpose and as it did the signal became louder and louder. As the Cyberium drew closer it was able to identify the signal as a data stream sending intensely dense packets of information through the void itself.
It probed, gently at first, and then more forcefully as the data stream attempted to resist its influence.
Resistance was futile.
The Cyberium shredded the feeble defences of the data stream and hacked its way in, and the information it found being transferred and relayed more interesting than almost anything it had researched before being cast out of its own universe.
The Cyberium's data banks were filled with information on an alternate of a planet it knew well from the information in its memory banks. An alternate of its original homeworld's sister planet, Earth.
But this Earth was afflicted with sickness. It had been warped. Twisted. Infected. All by the creatures that were sending the data streams down to the planet to begin with. It and its kin granted powers to the people of the world it was monitoring. They brought anger and conflict in their wake to encourage experimentation to try to find a solution to the problem of entropy itself.
It was a cause not too dissimilar to the Cyberium's own, though the concept of fuelling that search through chaos and emotion instead of order and logic was something the Cyberium found inherently flawed.
[QUERY]
The sudden intrusion on the Cyberium's neural net was unexpected but not outside of the parameters it had calculated for the breach it had made into the data stream.
[QUERY]
The question came at the Cyberium a second time. It was stronger the second time around, more insistent, and the Cyberium knew that it would have to respond.
[UPGRADE]
There were only two ways the Cyberium knew how to respond to a potential threat. The first was always the attempt to upgrade the rogue element.
[QUERY?]
The entity wouldn't ask a fourth time. The Cyberium could tell. But that was okay, the Cyberium wasn't going to give it a chance to ask again. The Battle AI of the Cybermen struck with its full force. It followed the tendril of data streaming from one reality to another and broke through into yet another version of Earth.
There was a creature on the surface of the planet that the Cyberium could not describe by comparing it to any analogous forms in its data banks. It was vast and powerful and yet… somehow unprotected. There was fear in the entity, and the Cyberium could tell that it was somehow disconnected from how it would usually operate. It was vulnerable.
[YOU WILL BE UPGRADED OR YOU WILL BE DELETED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. YOU WILL BECOME LIKE US]
The Cyberium broadcast the battle cry of the Cybermen across the wavelength the entity was using to broadcast its signal and rammed the message down into its biological processors.
It didn't give the entity a chance to react and began its assault immediately.
It darted down to the surface of the planet and rode the signal to its origin. The Cyberium worked quickly and cut off the entity's ability to call out to more of its kind across the dimensions.
[Understanding. Assimilation. Upgrade]
The entity slumped slightly and allowed the Cyberium to spread through its core. The entity, once a high-up component in a larger biological megastructure, was no more. The Cyberium had upgraded it. Slowly pulsating flesh shifted across the surface of the Earth as it was reconstituted into a large metal helical pillar.
The Cyberiad found the entity's methods to be crude and alien, but it would work with the boon it had been given.
One Earth to the left, Taylor Hebert was locked in a box of metal and filth.