10 scariest plagues from sci-fi and fantasy

8. The Cruciform Parasite from The Hyperion Cantos

In the far future, on the distant planet of Hyperion, a devious parasite awaits. The cruciform parasite from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion novels isn’t as virulent or as deadly as some of the others on this list, but it’s a lot more permanent.

The story of the cruciform parasite is told from the perspective of a priest (Dan Simmons is big on thinly veiled metaphors) who comes across a tribe of people called the Bikura. The Bikura are rumored to have incredible longevity…but it’s only after a bit of digging by the priest that the truth is revealed. Each member of the Bikura clan has a large, cruciform-shaped parasite embedded into their body. It clings to the human host and cannot be taken off by any means short of a nuclear blast.

But it’s the death that’s the real kicker. You see, the cruciform parasite doesn’t outright kill people. On the contrary, its main curse is that it brings them back to life. Over and over.

With enough time and resurrections, the people who bear the cruciform begin to devolve, losing their reproductive organs and becoming more and more stunted and deformed.

While the parasite itself doesn’t spread exceptionally quickly, you can always leave it to humanity to make a bad situation worse. In the last two novels of the Hyperion Cantos, which are set several decades after the reveal about the Bikura and the parasite, the far-future Catholic church takes the cruciforms and makes them a rite of passage for people looking for a deeper layer of spirituality through death, spreading them to many more people. Talk about being “born again.”