Showing posts with label Nemesis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nemesis. Show all posts

Monday 21 September 2020

Every Living Thing




YOU, are Becoming GODS

There's a new Master of Creation, 
and it's YOU

You’ve unraveled DNA --
and at the same time you're cultivating bacteria strong enough to 
Kill Every Living Thing
 

D’you think you are ready for that much Power? 

You lot? You lot? 

Y’Cheeky bastards!



“Iain Spence published Sekhmet Hypothesis: The Signals of the Beginning of a New Identity as a book in 1995, but it wasn’t until two years later that I came across his ideas in an article he’d written for the magazine Towards 2012. As an illuminating way of reconsidering the familiar, I’m particularly fond of the Sekhmet Hypothesis, which never fails to get people talking at parties. 

As usual, please remember that this is just a framework; a way of ordering information into meaningful patterns in the service of creative lateral thinking, if you like. 

Nineteen eighty-eight saw ecstasy, or MDMA, as the favoured drug, accompanying long-form trance, ambient and dance music, Manchester “baggy” fitness wear as street wear, grunge beards, and a return to long hair. 

In comic books, this was the time of Deadline, Doom Patrol, Shade, and Sandman.





“I'm a bit upset with the art now that John Ridgway's not doing much and Tim Perkins is taking over. I like working with John but he's just too busy now to devote much of his time to Dr Who. I don't know if I'll do any more Dr Whos, but I quite enjoyed it. 

I really liked Colin Baker's Doctor, but he was never given a decent storyline. The potential was wasted. 

I'm nervously waiting for the reaction of the readers to my new comic story, because there's a lot of stuff about continuity and I'm afraid I screwed it up. 



I based the story [The World Shapers] on a text piece I remembered from an old annual - I think it was 1966 - which I thought was set on the planet Marinus. 

Recently I discovered the annual at a comic mart, and when I re-read the text story it wasn't set on Marinus at all and it wasn't anything like I'd remembered. 

So, I've messed with the continuity and I've also brought back Jamie as an old man, which will probably bring in some flak from the die-hards. 

Thing is, if you're going to do it, you might as well make the effort to try something different. 

I think if I'd written for the T.V. series and brought back an old Jamie, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece; because it's the comic, they'll probably say 'You're messing with sacred stuff!'

There was a Dr Who story they wouldn't let me do last year. 

I came up with this idea where the Doctor meets two future versions of himself, a sort of 'Three Doctors' thing. 
I thought, 'I won't do two Doctors from the past, I'll do two from the future', to make it a bit different. 


One of them was a woman and they wouldn't let me do that at all. They said the readership wouldn't accept it. There was some big controversy."

GM,
After-Image,
January 1988








“He turned to the computer and touched one of its graphics display keys. Instantly, Peri was replaced by another tortured figure. The Doctor recognised Dastari. It was a perfect holographic forgery, he thought.

He touched the key again and another figure appeared that he didn’t recognise. A rather scruffy person in an ill-fitting tailcoat and black string necktie.

The Doctor switched off the machine and sank back into the control chair with his mind racing. Although he would instantly recognise The Brigadier or Leela or any of his past companions, he scarcely had any recollection of how he himself had appeared in past forms. 

Nonetheless, he thought, it was all Lombard Street to a China orange that the chap in the tailcoat was himself. In that case, not only had his sartorial taste improved, but at last it was all beginning to make sense."

— Robert Holmes,
The Two Doctors




“From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, making a Doctor Who record appears to be an obvious populist choice. It is, after all, one of the most successful and best-loved series on British TV. 

This was not the case in 1988, when ‘Doctorin’ The TARDIS’ was released. 

At that time, Doctor Who was largely considered an embarrassment, by both the BBC and the viewing public at home. 
If Drummond and Cauty had been drawn to it for populist reasons, their timing was out.”




“If we take Alan Moore’s model of IdeaSpace seriously – if only for a moment – and look at the idea of Doctor Who, we see an extremely detailed fiction. 


The Doctor is one of the great line of British folk heroes; a character in the tradition of Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. Whereas American folk heroes tend towards cowboys or gangsters who take what they want from the world and end up either rich or winners, British equivalents are very different. 

They are anti-Establishment figures, even when they work with the Establishment, and they save the day not for personal gain, but because it is the right thing to do


For generations of British school kids, Doctor Who was the myth they grew up with. 

They had only the most superficial knowledge of the likes of Zeus, Odin or Jesus, but they knew all there was to know about Davros, The Master and Cybermen. 


The Doctor is the first British folk hero of the TV age, and the nature of his TV origins make him unusual. There is no definitive creator standing behind him, no Arthur Conan Doyle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming or J. K. Rowling. Instead, he popped out from the space between many minds. 

There was a succession of different actors, writers and producers who all invigorated the character for a short while before moving on or burning out. 

The character is defined by his ability to regenerate and change his personality. He can change all his friends and companions. He can go anywhere, at any time. He is, essentially, the perfect, never-ending story. He will survive long after you, me or anyone currently involved in making the series has died. 

He adapts, grows, mutates and endures. In this he fulfils much of the standard definitions for A Living Thing. 

This is not bad going, for A Fiction. 

Already, there are untold thousands of Doctor Who stories, which, for a character of fiction, is almost unheard of. There have been hundreds of stories on TV, and many, many more available as novels, audio CDs, comic books, films, stage plays, webcasts, fanfics and radio programmes. 

The growth of the story, compared to any other fiction from the same period, is deeply unusual. Indeed, it has become arguably the most expansive and complex non-religious fiction ever created. 

According to Moore’s model of IdeaSpace, this fiction may be complicated enough to act like A Living Thing. 

Note that this is not to say that Doctor Who is A Living Thing, for that would sound crazy. 

It is to say that it behaves as if it were A Living Thing, which is a much more reasonable observation. 

Of course, if you were to then go on to try to define the difference between Something That is Living and Something That Behaves Like it is Living, you would be a brave soul indeed. 

The programme’s expansion through all possible media was begun by its first script editor, David Whitaker. 

Although Doctor Who has no definitive ‘creator’, Whitaker can be said to be the man who nurtured the heart of the series, sculpting the peculiar mix of humour, morality and wide-eyed imagination that makes the series so unique. 

He was involved in the creation of most of the iconography of the show, from introducing the Daleks, to making the TARDIS in some way alive and the Doctor able to regenerate into a different actor. 

He also spread the life of the character beyond television, for he wrote the first novels and annuals and co-wrote the Peter Cushing Dr Who movies from the 1960s. Whitaker’s work on Doctor Who was particularly influenced by alchemy, a subject that he claimed to be ‘very fond of’. 

The basic alchemical principle, that a physical object can be affected by the manipulation of a symbol of that object – the idea of it, if you prefer – is used explicitly in his 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks (which is also a strong contender for the story that invented steampunk.) The Evil of the Daleks is about a pair of Victorian scientists who accidentally build a time machine out of 144 mirrors (the number ‘144’, or 122, being alchemically significant). 


This basic alchemical principle is still used in the programme today, for example in Steven Moffat’s claim about his monsters the Weeping Angels: ‘The image of an Angel is an Angel.’ 

In Whitaker’s Doctor Who, when the TARDIS broke down because of a problem with the ‘mercury in the fluid links’, there was specific alchemical symbolism in the choice of mercury. 

When the first Doctor, William Hartnell, was replaced by the second, Patrick Troughton, Whitaker gave him a flute and an obsession with hats in order to echo the classical god Mercury (Hermes to the Greeks). 

All this would have meant little to the children watching in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Whitaker seems to have been consciously shaping the character of the Doctor into a mercurial, Trickster figure. 

When the current Doctor Who writers claim that they only became writers because of Doctor Who, they usually credit the series of novels which Whitaker started and which young boys devoured during the 1970s. 

There is another explanation, however, which comes from the very format of the programme. 

In the original series, episodes built towards a climax and ended on a cliff-hanger in which the Doctor or his friends appeared to be in inescapable danger. 

Of course, the children watching knew that the Doctor would somehow survive. He always did. The Question, then, was not Would he escape?’, but ‘How?’

What could possibly happen to get the Doctor out of that situation? 

There would be much debate about this in school playgrounds after each episode. 

And as the kids thought about the problem, their imaginations were being stoked. 

They were thinking like writers. 

Indeed, they were trying to write the next episode themselves

What we have here, then, is a character of fiction, neither created nor ‘owned’ by any one imagination, who is actively creating the very environment – writers’ minds – that it needs to survive into the future. 

Not only is Doctor Who a fictitious character who acts like a living thing by constantly evolving and surviving, it is also a self-sustaining living thing that creates the one thing that it needs to survive. 

From an evolutionary point of view, that’s impressive

There is no requirement for those affected by an idea to be aware of any of this. 

When the media critic Philip Sandifer writes that ‘David Whitaker, at once the most important figure in Doctor Who’s development and the least understood, created a show that is genuinely magical and this influence cannot be erased from within the show’, he does not mean that any of the hundreds of actors and writers who went on to work on the programme saw it in those terms. 

Or, as Sandifer so clearly puts it, ‘I don’t actually believe that the writers of Doctor Who were consciously designing a sentient metafiction to continually disrupt the social order through a systematic process of détournement. 

Except maybe David Whitaker.’ 

From Drummond and Cauty’s perspective, the story of Doctor Who is irrelevant. All that was happening was that they were exploring their mental landscape, and they were fulfilling their duty as artists by doing so more deeply than normal people. 

This is a landscape with many unseen, unknown areas where who knows what might be found. The KLF explored further than most and, if we were to accept Moore’s model, it would perhaps not be surprising that a fiction as complex as Doctor Who could encounter them in Ideaspace and, being at its lowest point and in dire need of help, use them for its own ends. 

For Moore, and other artists such as the film-maker David Lynch who use similar models, The Role of The Artist is like that of A Fisherman. It is his job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all his skill to best present his catch to an audience. 

Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish. Lacking any clear sense of what they were doing, they dived in as deeply as Moore and Lynch. They did not have a specific purpose for doing so. They just needed to make something happen – anything really, such is the path of chaos. 

It was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn’t fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with the glitter beat, which was never really our intention but we had to go with it,’ Cauty has said. ‘It was like an out-of-control lorry, you know, you’re just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over, really, and did what it wanted to do. 

We were just watching.’ 

This lack of intention is significant, from a magical point of view. 

One of the most important aspects of magical practice is The Will

Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in The World brought about by the exercise of The Will, hence his maxim ‘Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law’. 

The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself up to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them. 

Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who knows whats that live out of sight in the depths of IdeaSpace. 

For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond wastotally mad’. 

All this only applies if you’re prepared to accept the notion of Magic. 

Nevertheless, it is worth noting because there is another fiction that is important in Drummond and Cauty’s story. This one is more significant, because this is the fiction that they became, taking on its title and performing their actions in its name. It is also the source of our whirlwind of synchronicities. 

We are talking, of course, about The Justified Ancients of Mummu. The question then becomes: did Cauty and Drummond choose The JAMs, or did The JAMs choose Cauty and Drummond? A possible clue will come later, when we look at what the founding purpose of The Justified Ancients of Mummu actually was.”



Saturday 26 October 2019

1988




Always Two, There Are :
No More, No Less —
A Master, and An Apprentice.


“Nineteen eighty-eight saw ecstasy, or MDMA, as the favored drug, accompanying long-form trance, ambient and dance music, Manchester “baggy” fitness wear as street wear, grunge beards, and a return to long hair. In comic books, this was the time of Deadline, Doom Patrol, Shade, and Sandman.”

Excerpt From
Supergods
Grant Morrison


Det. Sgt. Joe Friday :
Let me tell you something, Mr Lone Wolf — 
The dedicated people of the Los Angeles Police Department are one big family, from my brother, the traffic cop, to my sister, the meter maid, 
and when one of us makes a collar, we ALL make a collar.

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
Friday, are you on any •particular• kind of medication that as your partner I should be made aware of....?








The reason The Delorean has to be going 88 mph to break The Time Barrier is Because it is two infinity symbols rotated 90 degrees to The Perpendicular.

If you try to time travel from 1985, you arrive in 1955.

If you try to Time Travel from 1988, you end up in a Moebius Loop, and That is Why We NEED Eddie Van Halen.




















Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
This guy knows God personally.
I hear they play racquetball together.

Det. Sgt. Joe Friday :
You just chuckle away, Mister —
I don't hear God laughing.

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
You will, once He sees your haircut.









Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :

Joe Friday :
Look, there's the mayor.
Pretty clever of Whirley manoeuvring him up here to Caesar's party.
He's got both people he wants to eliminate in one place.
Hey, isn't that Whirley's car?


Good evening, Reverend.
Child.

Joe Friday :
I don't see Connie.
The next car comes, follow me in.

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
Wait. YOU can't go in there.


When did you become Miss Manners?

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
First, you don't have a warrant.

Joe Friday :
Penal Code 836: A police officer
may make an arrest without a warrant if he believes there's probable cause...

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
You're NOT a police officer any more.
I hate to be the one to break that to you, but it's The Truth.
You charge in there now, you'll NEVER get your badge back.

Joe Friday :
Whirley's the only one that knows where Connie is.
He'll tell or I'll shove that collar so far down his throat I'll have to take off his shoes to wring his neck.

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
You're not even •thinking• like a cop any more.
You're thinking like a Man in Love.

Joe Friday :
Watch your language, Mister!

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
Oh, Joe, l...
You've never •had• these feelings before, have you?

Joe Friday :
Almost.
I had a kitten once.

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
This is gonna be a little different.
Connie won't be sleeping in a box or meowing all night or climbing up your drapes.
Or, maybe she will —You both are sort of starting from scratch with this thing.

Joe Friday :
Get out of my way!

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
Last time you went after Whirley, you got suspended. 
Now you'll get arrested.

Joe Friday :
On what charge, Junior?

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
How about Section 146-A?
That's right — Impersonating a Police Officer.
It's for your own good, Joe.
In spite of every logical instinct
I've ever had... I consider you a Real Friend.

Joe Friday :
Wait.

Det. Sgt. Pep Streebeck :
Joe, GO HOME.
There's nothing more you can do here.
Believe me.
By the way, my name is Pep.
It's not ‘Mister’, ‘Junior’,
‘bub’ or ‘Streebek’. 

It's Pep.

Friendships •START• with first names... Joe.






Thanks, Max.


”On promotional copies, only a song listing and catalog number—25677—were printed on the disc itself. 

The commercial version was to only have the catalog number—printed in pink—on the spine.9 The original compact disc pressing was made by Sony DADC rather than WEA Manufacturing. 

After Prince became convinced that the album was “evil”, he ordered it to be withdrawn a week before its release date. It was replaced with the album Lovesexy, a brighter pop-oriented album with elements of religious affirmation.”







“The album features one of the most atypical Prince songs: “BOB George”, in which he assumes the identity of a profane man who suspects his girlfriend to have had an affair with a man named BOB. He asks her what the man does for a living and learns that BOB manages Prince, whom he dismisses as “that skinny motherfucker with the high voice”. 

The gun-wielding alter ego then fires a multitude of gunshots, and ends up being raided by The Police. During live performances of the song during the Lovesexy Tour, he ends up being SHOT. 

The name for the track was a combination of BOB Cavallo (former manager), and Nelson George, who was felt to have become very critical of Prince. “BOB George” features a growling monologue that is slowed down to the point of being almost unrecognizable as Prince. The voice at the end of the song that says “bizarre” is actually a stock sound from the Fairlight CMI IIx library, with its pitch raised.

Saturday 2 September 2017

I Have You in My Eye, Sir


Why, who could flourish on such a daily diet of compliance..?

To be Curbed!Stood-up to! - in a word, thwarted!! - exercises The Character, makes it more pliant.

It's the want of such exercise that makes rulers rigid.

The Mind must Cure.

My patients Work, Sir - and in so-doing, acquire a better conceit of them selves.


Dr. Willis: 
If the King refuses food, He will be restrained. 
If He claims to have no appetite, He will be restrained. 

If He swears and indulges in MEANINGLESS DISCOURSE... 
He will be restrained. 

If He throws off his bed-clothes, tears away His bandages, scratches at His sores, and if He does not strive EVERY day and ALWAYS towards His OWN RECOVERY

... then, He must be restrained.

George III: 
I am the King of England!!


Dr. Willis: 
NO, sir!

You are The PATIENT.

Tuesday 29 August 2017

Mondas Rising : Weaponised Astrology

…as I wandered through the Wyrrd and Lurid landscape of Another Planet —


Mondas : Gaia's Evil Twin
Or, Nemesis.

POLLY
What's happened to you, Doctor? 

Old Grandfather
Oh, I'm not sure, my dear. 
Comes from 
an outside influence. 
Unless this old body of mine is wearing a bit thin....

— suddenly, there was A Change.



The existence of 
The Mars Effect 
scientifically verifies 
the most fundamental 
principle of astrology : 
That there is a connection 
between a person's character 
and the planetary positions 
at the time and location of birth. 

Here, too, reasonable people 
can come to no other conclusion -- 
especially after they examine 
the whole of the nearly 40 years 
of Gauquelin research. 

Astrologers, of course, have described 
just such a connection all along.

 



Old Grandfather: 
Your Planet is finished. 
It will disintegrate. 
We know why you came here, 
so why not stay and live 
with us in peace

REGOS KRANG: 

We will confer. 
Keep your places. 
Anyone who moves will be killed instantly. 

BARCLAY: 
Can We Trust Them? 

BEN: 
No, of course we can't. 

Old Grandfather : 
We have no chance. 
We must play for time. Be quiet. 

Well, sir, what have you decided? 

REGOS KRANG: 
We cannot talk while that missile is aimed at Mondas. 
It must be disarmed first. 

Old Grandfather : 
A moment, please. 
Are you able to disarm this rocket? 

BARCLAY: 
Well, yes, but, er -

Old Grandfather : 
It will give us the time we need. 

BEN: 
The time for Mondas to burn itself out, you mean?  

REGOS KRANG: 
Listen to me -
 This close proximity of our two planets means that one has to be eliminated for the safety of the other. 

The One to Be Destroyed will be Earth. 

We cannot allow Mondas to burn up. 

If you help, we will take you all 
back to Mondas with us. 
There you will be safe

BEN: 
Yeah? For how long? 

DYSON: 
It could be our only chance. 

BEN: 
The Answer is No! 
We'll just sit tight here 
until Mondas breaks up. 

Now then, you'd better release 
The Doctor and Polly 
and send them down here. 

You're gonna need Our Help 
when Mondas is gone.

KRANG : 
Mondas will not burn up. 
Take The Old Man out to the spacecraft. 


BEN : 
Look, The Doctor said that 
it's not only Earth that's in danger, 
but that Mondas itself 
is in far greater danger. 

Otherwise, why have they bothered coming Here? 

CUTLER: 
And just how did he figure that out? 

It's draining energy 
from the Earth, isn't it? 

BEN: 
Yes, but he said eventually 
it would absorb too much energy 
and burn itself out. 

Well, shrivel up to nothing. 

So all we've got to do is wait! 




BEN: 
Right, Doctor. While they take him out, 
we'll make a break for it! 

Old Grandfather : 
Hmm? 

BEN: 
We can get back to the TARDIS! 

Old Grandfather : 
Well how can we do that, boy? 

BEN: 
Well, we can make a break for it down that corridor, 
to the trapdoor and then bolt it from behind. 

Old Grandfather: 
Nonsense, nonsense, 
They'll burn us down in a flash. 


Upset The Established Order
and everything becomes chaos -- 

....I'm An Agent of Chaos. 

Oh, and you know 
The Thing About Chaos...? 

It's Fair.

reiki to the rescue 




BARCLAY: 
Take visual checks on Mars 
to establish position. Report back. 


WILLIAMS [OC]: 
Will do, out. 


[Zeus 4]


WILLIAMS: 
Did you get that, Dan? 


SCHULTZ: 
Yeah. 

WILLIAMS: 
Okay, go ahead. 
Should be about 4-2-0. 

(Checking through the telescope.

SCHULTZ: 
No. It's 4-3-2. 

WILLIAMS: 
It can't be. Try again. 

SCHULTZ: 
I am. 

WILLIAMS: 
Come on, shake it up. 
We'll be back in sunrise in a bit. 

SCHULTZ: 
Cut it out, Glyn. 

WILLIAMS: 
Did you read conversation?

BARCLAY [OC]: 
Yes. We're getting a Mars fix too. Call back. 

SCHULTZ: 
Hey, Glyn? 

WILLIAMS: 
Yeah? 

SCHULTZ: 
Well, er, take it easy but, er 

WILLIAMS: 
Come on, come on, what is it? 

SCHULTZ: 
It wasn't Mars I had.

WILLIAMS: 
Well that explains it, doesn't it. 
Come on now, Dan, try again. 

SCHULTZ: 
No, listen, Glyn, there's 
Something Else out there. 

WILLIAMS: 
What do you mean? 

SCHULTZ
There's Another Planet out there! 

WILLIAMS: 
Another Planet

SCHULTZ: 
Yeah. 

WILLIAMS: 
Yeah, you're right. 
There is something. 
I can't see properly but it reads 
as if it was in orbit between 
Mars and Venus.



SCHULTZ: 
Yeah, that's it. 

Funny how I can't put me finger on it 
but it looks kinda familiar.



WILLIAMS: 

Yeah. 



SCHULTZ: 
Came the dawn. 

WILLIAMS: 
Yeah. Well, I guess we've had enough 
Earth observations for a bit. 

Hello Snowcap. Hello Snowcap. 

We're now in dawn over San Francisco. 
Can you get the subject from where you are? 

BARCLAY [OC]: 
Snowcap to Zeus 4. 
You are very faint. 
Put up your power output please. 

WILLIAMS: 
It is up. 

BARCLAY [OC]: 
Reading you strength three
Come in, please. 

WILLIAMS: 
Repeat, can you get the subject on your retina scope? 

BARCLAY [OC]: 
Can do. 

WILLIAMS: 
Hey. Hey, Dan. That's odd. 

SCHULTZ: 
Yeah? 

WILLIAMS: 
Fuel cells are showing a power loss






[Tracking room]
BARCLAY: (into microphone) 
May I have your attention, everybody. 
This is very important, so please listen carefully.
 
Final orbit commencing from base reference one is four minutes, ten seconds [410] from now.
 
Now, we've got a very difficult job on our hands 
and I want everybody to be on their toes all the time. 

If the capsule power falls too low 
I shall take over re-entry from here, 
and for that I want the entire team behind me. 

Now, base reference one commencing 

[Observation area]
BARCLAY [OC]: 
Now. 

Old Grandfather : 
Yes, they must bring them down

BEN: 

But why, Doctor? 

Old Grandfather: 
Because they can't last another orbit. 

[Tracking room]
(The Doctor storms in, then stops as he spots three pairs of silver boots entering from outside. He shakes the General's shoulder.


Old Grandfather:
It's imperative that I talk to you, General. 



CUTLER: 
Get away, old man. Can't you see 



DOCTOR: (to Barclay.) 
You, will you pay attention? Will you?! 



(Cutler sees the three Cybermen and mistakes them for soldiers.



CUTLER: 
Get this man back into the Observation room. 
Sergeant, that was an order! 
Take that man back to the obs 


(The Cyberman takes off his parka. Polly screams. The other two Cybermen reveal themselves.



CUTLER: 
Back to your places. 



(Suddenly, the soldier who had been guarding the Doctor, Ben and Polly rushes towards the Cyberman with his gun raised. The Cyberman at the top of the landing aims a light device at him. Smoke comes from the guard's body, and he falls backwards to the floor.


[Observation room]
POLLY: 
Oh. no! 



BEN: 
Come back, Polly. They'll blow your head off! 



Old Grandfather : 
Hey! 

[Tracking room]
CUTLER: 
Now look, I don't know who you are or what you are, but we've got two men in space. If we don't act now we won't get them back alive. 



(The Cyberman opens its mouth but does not move any lips as it speaks in a strange sing-song tone that puts emphasis in all the wrong places.) 



KRAIL: 
They will not return. 



CUTLER
Why not? 



KRAIL
It is unimportant now. 



CUTLER
But We must get them back! When --



KRAIL
There is really no point. 
They could never reach Earth now. 



POLLY :
But don't you care

KRAIL
Care? No, why should I care? 

POLLY: 
Because they're people 
and they're going to die

KRAIL: 
I do not understand you --
There are people dying all over Your World 
Yet you do not care about them



(Polly rushes in, with the Doctor and Ben behind her.



POLLY: 
Yes, but we could avoid their deaths. 



KRAIL: 
You will be wondering what has happened. Your astronomers must have just discovered a new planet. Is that not so? 



BARCLAY: 
Yes, that's right. 



KRAIL
That is where we come from. 
It is called Mondas. 


BEN
Mondas? 


BARCLAY
Mondas? But isn't that one of the ancient names of Earth? 


KRAIL
Yes. Aeons ago the planets were twins, 
then we drifted away from you on a journey 
to the edge of space. Now we have returned. 


BEN
You were right, Doctor. 



BARCLAY: 
But who or what are you? 



KRAIL: 
We are called Cybermen. 



BARCLAY: 
Cybermen? 



KRAIL
Yes, Cybermen. 
We were exactly like you once 
but our cybernetic scientists realised 
that our race was getting weak. 


BARCLAY
Weak? How? 

KRAIL
Our life span was getting shorter, 
so our scientists and doctors devised spare parts 
for our bodies until we could be 
almost completely replaced. 

POLLY
But that means you're not like us. 
You're robots! 



KRAIL: 
Our brains are just like yours except that 
certain weaknesses have been removed. 



BARCLAY: 
Weaknesses? What weaknesses? 



KRAIL: 
You call them emotions, do you not? 



POLLY: 
But that's terrible -- You, you mean 
you wouldn't care about someone in pain? 



KRAIL: 
There would be no need. 
We do not feel pain. 



POLLY: 
But we do!