Cerebral Leech

Hirudinea Cerebrophage

One of the most insidious threats that can be encountered in the vast reaches of The Lost Expanse, the Cerebral Leech has an unnerving tendency to appear nearly invisible, but only to wetware CPUs. An optical camera will see it. A thermal imager will detect its body heat. A sufficiently sensitive Electrometry suite will detect its intricate cerebral activity. The big issue is, while they can be easily detected by a silicon based hardware CPU, live Cerebral Leeches possess a sort of exotic psychokinetic camouflage that makes them all but imperceptible to a wetware CPU.
On the dissection table, a dead Cerebral Leech is a long, fat worm, grey-pink in colour and covered in deep wrinkles akin to a healthy human brain. In the field, live Cerebral Leeches appear only as anomalous splotches in a sensor network. They may appear as dark spots in certain systems, or as odd smears in optical systems that a CPU's perception just slips off of whenever they attempt to focus on them. Integrated hardware systems will happily see Cerebral Leeches coming and trigger proximity warnings, however the inability for wetware to perceive them leads wetware systems to dismiss these warnings as a glitch.
A Cerebral Leech is typically classed as being somewhere between a predator and a parasite. They feed upon the brains encased within a wetware CPU case, burrowing its way into the very heart of a machine in order to get to the precious grey matter buried deep under the layers of steel and circuitry. A wetware unit being parasitised by a Cerebral Leech will begin to degrade in quality over time until it eventually ceases to function. The rate at which a CPU degrades is dependent on the size of the Cerebral Leech, as well as on environmental factors from the hole in its casing exposing it to its surroundings. In very rare cases, a Cerebral Leech can fuse with the wetware, leading to very undesirable and abberant behaviour in the system that the CPU is supposed to be governing.