Traveler

Travelers are from Michael Shea's “The Autopsy”.

Description

In this form we have inhabited the densest brainless of three hundred races, lain intricately snug within them like thriving vine on trellis work. We’ve looked out from too many variously windowed masks to regret our own vestigial senses.... Far better to slip on as we do, whole living beings and wear at once all of their limbs and organs, memories and powers - wear all as tightly congruent to our wills as a glove it to the hand that fills it.
— Michael Shea's “The Autopsy”

Travelers are a space-faring race of intelligent parasites, traveling in small, translucent spacecraft which arrive in meteor showers bearing larval travelers - small, oozing, worm-like, tendriled beings which can lurk in hiding for the chance to lash out with their hooked tentacles to seize a suitable host to immobilize with an injected toxin or infect while sleeping, and then infest the host by entering the body through the mouth. Once inside the body, the Traveler will begin a complicated life cycle culminating in its brain-like adult stage, which is capable of fully controlling its host.

While lodged in its host, the Traveler can extend its tendrils from the host's mouth to paralyze other victims, which it can hide away somewhere for storage as a food source, which the Traveler can return to periodically to drink the paralyzed victim's blood until the victim is dead; even after death, the decaying flesh of these victims is used to feed and sustain the Traveler's host body. Travelers are also able to revive and control these corpses for short periods of time, or revive and control a dead host; a reanimated host can allow the Traveler a chance to seek out and infest a new host, and other reanimated corpses can act as short-lived Zombie servants.

Associated Mythos Elements

• artifact: Traveler spacecraft, a basketball-sized translucent sphere capable of guided interstellar travel; includes a self-destruct mechanism to protect the Travelers' technology and species from curious outsiders.

References

• fiction: Michael Shea's “The Autopsy”
• film - "The Autopsy" has not (yet) been adapted to film, but there have been a number of similar stories that have:
  • Puppet Masters (1994 film) (based on a 1951 novel of the same name by Robert Heinlein, which might well have been the story that inspired all the others)
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 film) (maybe the most famous "replaced by alien parasites" story, based on a 1954 pulp serial by Jack Finney)
  • Brain Eaters (1958 film) (Roger Corman film so similar to "The Puppet Masters", it prompted Heinlein to sue)
  • The Faculty (1998 film)
  • Outer_Limits_(1963_series) and its revival have revisited much the same themes a time or two, including the episode "The Invisibles"
  • Star_Trek_(1966_franchise) (the "Operation: Annihilate!" episode of the original series bears a suspicious similarity to "Puppet Masters")
• sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum