George Cooper
George Cooper was an old man with dementia who became a permanent resident at St John's Hospital. He was one of Lauren Anderson's patients and she became very fond of him.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
In his youth, George had been associated with a man called Sam. He spoke of Sam often to Lauren, and she deduced that the two had been more than friends, although George never said so explicitly. He later had a daughter, but she was estranged for him by the time of his residence at St John's. (PROSE: Cyberon)
Death[[edit] | [edit source]]
George was one of the patients chosen for testing of the new PKD drug Cyberon — indeed, he was the first to receive an injection from Tom Mordley. The effects overnight were extremely encouraging, with George becoming much more coherent and energetic than he had been in years, but the following night, as the drug tried to fulfil its true purpose of converting him into a metallic Cyberon humanoid, George experienced nightmares about the Cyberons. He woke up from them in the middle of the night to see an apparition of a non-corporeal Cyberon humanoid that only he could see; he tried to run away after calling for his carer, before keeling over, killed by a fear-induced heart attack. (PROSE: Cyberon)
Post-mortem[[edit] | [edit source]]
Wanting to personally investigate whether Cyberon had anything to do with his death, Doctor Mordley had George's body moved to PKD's British facility for a full autopsy by Evan, which was witnessed by himself and Lauren. They noticed some Cyberon in his veins, its silvery glow visible through the skin, but the autopsy otherwise confirmed the diagnosis that George had died of an ordinary heart attack.
After she forcibly took some Cyberon herself, Lauren began being followed around by a "ghost" of George Cooper, looking as he did during his autopsy. George acted liks his normal self, and seemed strangely calm about his new existence. He refused to confirm to Lauren whether he was the actual soul of George, kept alive inside the Cyberon hive mind despite the death of his physical body, or if he was a psychic construct, enabled by the Cyberon, based on Lauren's memories of her old friend. At any rate, he had an insightful conversation with her about what the introduction of Cyberon to the human population might eventually lead to, which helped snap her out of her trance-like state of acceptance of Cyberon, reject cyber-conversion, and eventually defeat Mordley. (PROSE: Cyberon)
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
George originated in the 2000 BBV Productions video drama Cyberon, which also featured the debut of Lauren Anderson. There, he was played by Oliver Bradshaw, who also voiced the Court Historian in BBV's Adventures in a Pocket Universe audio story The Choice. Though having evolved out of a project initially planned to star the Cybermen, the finished movie had no legal ties to the Doctor Who universe, having replaced the Cybermen with a new species, the Cyberons. For this reason, it is not covered by this Wiki.
Instead, we consider Arcbeatle Press's prose retelling of Cyberon in their anthology of the same name, which consciously retrofitted the movie's narrative into "in the Doctor Who world" by involving other pre-existing DWU concepts under licence from their creators, to be George's debut as a DWU character.
