Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

* My Little Pony unicorns. I'm thinking of crossing Piers Anthony's unicorns with hollow-ish musical horns, that blue guy from Guardians of the Galaxy who could control a thing with a whistle, and Charles Stross's Equoid parasite. Resulting in a horn-shaped, barnacle-like symbiote which can glue itself to various critters' heads (eventually integrating into their nervous sytems), and which itself contains its own tiny, flying bioluminescent symbiotes that respond to audible cues. (I can even throw in Care Bear style flank-marks on most equines.)

So the ponies are just normal ponies infested with a cthuluoid symbiote (which acts cute and cuddly)?

* Ghosts. I am still feeling my way around, but I'm hesitantly considering something based around every sapient inhabitant's mind being digitally uploaded to the hub, and generally given amnesia and inserted into new fetuses. I want "death" to still generally involve the loss of most things most humans would consider important about that person, but with enough demonstrable continuity for the locals to have various philosophies based around being close enough to immortal for death to be less worrisome.

You could have the brain backups only happen on a schedule dictated by the Great Cloud Keeper, so that if a cuddly dies, it loses recent memories (a year, month, week?). That would confirm the immortality, but still provide a sense of loss.