Excerpt: The Silver Men

“John!”

Looking up suddenly, the party stood still when they saw the young man on the balcony above them - John could barely believe it. “George?”

“John, don’t struggle,” he began, looking hazardously between his friends and the silver men. “just listen to me, all right? These... Cybermen things, they’ve got this idea about emotions being bad for us - that life without emotion is best for everyone. But I don’t believe that for one moment.”

“But George -”

“Let me finish, Paul; please.” George waited for a few moments, raising his hands to calm everyone down. “Right ... okay. Yes, I understand that all the pain and hurt in the world can make you think that there’s nothing else left to live for. It seems tempting, the thought of forgetting all of that misery and living forever. But you’d lose so much more than the bad; you’d lose the good too.

“Think of every time you’ve been happy - being with your family, seeing your son blow out the candles for his birthday, doing the job you’ve always wanted to do.” He realised what George was trying to do; he was reasoning with them, helping them to realise just how awful the alternative was. John thought of his son’s face smiling up at him, and felt his resolve harden.

“Emotions ruin the human condition, and make them incompatible with Cyberman ideals,” one of the Cybermen reasoned, but the man on the balcony continued on.

“All of that happiness and joy, it’s all gone once you become a Cyberman like them. The only things that’s left of you is the mathematics, the machinery of being human. Mechanical breathing, moving your arms and legs about - that’s not improving you. That’s making you almost dead on the inside!” George yelled angrily, his own rage bubbling up within him. “Life isn’t like that - it’s not just defined into good and bad, it’s all inter-linked. We have to take the bad things in life so that we can appreciate the good things as well - that’s just what we have to do, and hope that it all means we can leave this world in peace.”

“George...”

Paul looked up at them, his eyes widening in realisation at what his friend was saying and John knew that George was talking sense. What made the four of them ‘The Beatles’ wasn’t the thinking process or the fact that they were physically together - it was the things that made them unique and individual from one another. They worked as a unit yes, but they each made up part of the machine that made their music so perfectly.

“But anyway - enough about philosophy and all that pomp and circumstance,” he laughed, digging around in his pockets. “there’s another problem in becoming a Cyberman - the fact that you’re fully machine rather than human. As my good mate the Doctor explained, there’s all sorts that can go wrong with machinery - especially if you start messing around with noise frequencies.” He thrust his hand into the air and pressed a button on the little black box in his hand - and John almost instantly recognised the crashing chord of one of their songs.

He felt the grip on his back loosen and he fell to the floor, landing on his hands and knees and feeling them smack against the metal floor. The Cybermen around them was convulsing violently with their hands to their heads, screeching as their wiring exploded into sparks. John got up as quickly as he could and ran towards the other two members of the band, who looked even more fearful than before. The three of them watched the Cybermen around them fall to the floor and then looked up at George.

“Bloody hell George!” Ringo gasped in shock. “How the hell -?”

“Borrowed Danny’s phoney-thing from him, didn’t I?” he replied, holding the phone to show them. “The Doctor did some sort of thing to it to mess around with the sound so they would all blow up.”

“And the note he needed is coincidentally the first chord of A Hard Day’s Night?” John raised an eyebrow.

“Strange but true.”