Trope-a-Day: Slave Mooks

Slave Mooks: There are some species and polities that like to keep these around (often AIs or other disfavored “not-people” in the eyes of galactic bigots, although that tends to come with special risks; see Robot War), and some people – well, for ultimate values of complete bastards, people – do this on a small scale by shoving puppet implants into prisoners or even civilians, but perhaps the worst example is the one I hint at in Alien Invasion – spray some self-replicating indoctrination neurovirus into the atmosphere of the planet you’re attacking, then recruit all the enthusiastic mooks you’ll ever need from the newly rewritten local population.

Fortunately, none of the people with the technical ability to do this on a mass scale have yet had the urge to rocket themselves to the top of the Galactic Atrocities List and probably get half the Worlds coming to get xenocidal on their asses, but the thought does keep strategic defense planners up at night worrying.

Trope-a-Day: Puppeteer Parasite

Puppeteer Parasite: Mostly not naturally (due to the aversion of No Biochemical Barriers), but infectious neuroviruses can do a damn good impression of this – which is the sort of thing that makes defense planners twitchy, but no-one’s done it on a large scale yet (as mentioned under Alien Invasion), mostly because of what happens to people who earn that place on the Top Ten Galactic Atrocities List.

Another theoretical possibility – which as far as people know hasn’t been done at all – would be to encode a mind-state in a self-replicating/self-modifying infectious neurovirus to make a true puppeteer parasite clade.  Squicky.

But still, it’s nice to know there’s a firm-SF plausible way to do this: