CAUTION: This story is based on a COVID conspiracy theory. I do not personally believe in any such theories, but I’m sharing it anyway. The story was written in the early months of the COVID-19 quarantine, and this was the kind of dream I had some nights during that time.

We didn’t realize what the virus was really doing until it was too late.

Chinese scientists identified what they originally thought was simply a new cold virus in December 2019. For some reason, the name coronavirus caught on for labeling this one, even though all cold viruses are coronaviruses. Maybe it was to distinguish it, because it was clear by January this this was not a normal cold virus. Later still, the scientific designation COVID-19, meaning the coronavirus identified in 2019, became the norm.

It was different enough from all other cold viruses then common that nobody had any resistance to it. Scientists reassured us, though, that once we did have a vaccine, this virus was unlikely to mutate quickly to something the vaccine did not protect against. The explanation for this was that the mechanism by which the common cold vaccines mutated was that they were made of 8 DNA segments. When two cold viruses infected the same cell, the new viruses that cell was hijacked to produce sometimes swapped segments. But COVID-19 was made of a single segment. It could not swap segments. It could only mutate by overlap, the way the people sometimes got mixtures of the two different chromosomes of the same type from one of their parents, instead of getting one whole chromosome of that type, or by transcription error, the rarest type of mutation.

If only mutation had been our real worry.

The virus spread fast, even faster than we realized. At first people thought the first deaths from the virus had been in China in January, and the first in the US in late February. But later we realized some people who had died in the US in early February had probably been among its victims.

The count of infections and deaths skyrocketed. Even when there was a widespread campaign to encourage people to wash their hands frequently, minimize contact with other people, avoid large gatherings, and eventually, close all nonessential businesses and require people to wear face masks and stay 6 feet apart when visiting grocery stores and the like, it still spread. This only slowed it down.

What’s worse, the count of infections, which doubled every couple weeks, and the count of deaths, which varied around 5-10% of identified infections, was only the tip of the iceberg. When tests were more widely available and they started randomly testing asymptomatic people, we discovered that about a third of the population already had it, never showing any symptoms of it, by early May. By this point, there had been about 4 million identified infections worldwide and 300,000 deaths. But this suggested the actual number of infections was over 2 billion.

These random tests were repeated weekly, and by mid June, when the symptomatic cases were slowing down, it was because almost everybody had been infected. Not the deaths, though. If anything, the deaths accelerated, but they were all among clearly sick people who were not going out into society when everything else started opening back up. And they did: When people realized 99% of the population had already been infected and most had not even had mild symptoms, they saw no point in those measures to keep people from getting the virus. Instead, they just quarantined the ones still suffering from it.

7 billion infections. By late June, the total was 35 million deaths, 0.5% of the world population. Another 2% were gravely ill. The people who died from this were mostly ones who already had other health issues, and most of them were elderly. Healthy people got sick and recovered, or, in apparently over 90% of the cases, fought it off with no noticeable effects. Or so we thought.

June 29, 2020 was D-Day.

As people went to sleep the night of the 28th, they did not wake up. People working night shifts or otherwise up during the night might have noticed the lack of morning risers, but they were ready for their own sleep from which they did not awaken.

They slept, and slept.

Sometime on the 30th, in most parts of the world, the people arose, and did normal people things - they went to the bathroom, and ate a big meal after their 36-to-48-hour sleep.

The people also awoke to find that they no longer inhabited their bodies, and instead now lived in what were formerly inanimate objects near where their bodies slept. To their horror, their bodies arose without them and went on about their sort-of lives.

That was the case for me. I had created a makeshift sex doll out of pillows and other stuffing, and some clothes and other fabric, sewn together. She had some clothes covering her oversized boobs. I woke up to find myself now being the doll. My body was acting on its own. I climbed out of bed while my body finished eating, and when he tried to leave, I tried to block my body from leaving the house, but it was useless. He just swatted me away like the rag doll that I was. But I followed.

There were a bunch of other people out walking, too. None of them had bothered to change clothes, so they were variously wearing pajamas, nightgowns, underwear, lingerie, or nothing. They all seemed to be converging on a location. When I followed, I found that a few blocks away in a park there was what had to be some sort of spacecraft with boarding ramps open, and the people were all going inside.

I continued to follow, and got in line with people boarding. They didn’t stop me, and I walked up into the ship. There were several layers, like floors, each an open room with a hundred or so seats. As one floor filled up they went up to the next.

I sat in a seat among other people, and some sort of alien with an oversized head on a slender blue body came in with some sort of scanner, printing out a small tag which it fastened to each person’s wrist. When it got to me, it was clear the scanner revealed me as a fake, and it pulled some other device out, pressed a few buttons, and moved on. The two people seated beside me stood, picked me up, and carried me out of the ship, tossing me down to the ground from the side of the ramp.

It didn’t seem likely another attempt was going to be any more successful, so I headed back toward my house. On the way, I saw a few walking stuffed animals and dolls who I assumed were occupied by other people like me. I went over to join them, and their body expressions seemed to tell me they had the same thought and were glad to see a taller “person” join them. I tried to talk and realized I simply had no way to do so, and my companions’ silence suggested the same was true for them.

So I followed the group. There was a tiny G.I. Joe leading the way, and I soon realized he was canvassing the neighborhood, walking along every street. Thanks to my presence, more of the people who had been removed from their bodies saw our group, and they all started coming out to join us. Soon, there were hundreds of us marching in a long parade. We had quite a variety, ranging from a few even smaller than the G.I. Joe to bigger-than-life-size statues lumbering down the street with us. Most of them, though, were stuffed animals, dolls, or action figures between about 4 and 16 inches tall. I was definitely in the minority in being roughly human-sized.

We ultimately went to the park where the spaceship was, but at the other end of the park. G.I. Joe grabbed one larger doll’s hand and encouraged her to stand before the group. This doll could speak, and she addressed us:

“Most of you are in dolls of whatever sort which can’t talk, correct?”

There was a bunch of nodding of heads.

“Anybody who can talk, come forward.”

As they did, the first talking doll continued, “I was Jennifer, the mother of a little girl who this doll belonged to. My daughter is out there among you, in a doll which can’t talk. Both our bodies walked off without us and are probably on board this ship now.”

Three other dolls now stood beside her. She motioned to the first of them.

“I’m Sarah. I was eight years old and this was my doll. Now I’m the doll! My body walked away too.”

“I’m Fred,” the next doll said, which was pretty funny because he was clearly in a girl doll now. Though I couldn’t hear them, the motions of many of the dolls suggested they were laughing, but they stopped when he continued speaking. “This was my daughter’s doll. She’s now in a stuffed animal over there.”

“I’m Belinda, fifteen. This doll belonged to my younger sister.”

Jennifer continued, “I don’t know why we’re all living in our dolls now, but I assume whatever aliens brought this spaceship have stolen our bodies. How are we going to get them back?”

Before anybody could figure out how to respond, we all turned to where we heard a lot of noise. The ramps of the spaceship were withdrawing and closing, and the engines of the ship were starting to fire. Some of the larger ones of us started heading toward it, but before any of them got there, the ramps finished withdrawing, the doors closed, and the engines fired in full. In seconds, the ship soared up into the sky and out of sight.

Once the ones who left had returned to the group, Jennifer continued, “I guess that settles that.”

Nobody spoke for a bit, as I think nobody knew what to do. Belinda was the next to speak.

“I think we should find a way for the other people to communicate, so we can get their stories. Somebody probably knows something useful, only they can’t talk to tell us.”

Jennifer replied, “Good idea. Can we use pencil and paper?”

Fred responded, “Probably the larger ones can. Let’s split into groups, and we’ll go look for pencil and paper in the houses nearest us. Each group should be led by a larger doll who can reach things and somebody who lives in the house and knows where things are. Everybody else just follow one of them.”

Jennifer said, “Agreed. But it might take a while, especially if some of the people have a hard time writing. Let’s try to meet up here at, let’s say 10 tomorrow morning with each group leader bringing back his team’s responses.”

Jennifer and Fred together organized us in this way. They stood at two spots along the edge of the park, and had all those who lived in the houses directly across the street from the section between them stand in front of their houses. Next, the largest remaining dolls were split up across the houses with owners present so that each had someone likely to be able to reach things placed at human heights. Each of these brought any family members that had located with them. Finally, the remaining people were split roughly evenly among these houses, again keeping together families. That’s how I ended up leading a group of twenty or so dolls into one of the houses, including the three dolls that residents of the house had become.

Just like at my house, the door was open. None of the aliens who left in our bodies had bothered closing the doors behind them; where there was an automatic door closer, they still didn’t lock them. We went in and the residents helped me find pencils and paper. I had some difficulty with them myself. I had built the doll with arms, but I’d never bothered to make hands. I could use both arms together to lift a pad of paper, but I could really only knock the pencils down to where some of the smaller dolls that did have hands could pick them up. However, if somebody jabbed the eraser end of a pencil into the end of my arm, I could grasp it and write that way, and somebody did so because they were expecting me to lead the group, as we didn’t get one of the talkers. I wrote on the pad:

Everybody write your name, your address, how far your doll body was from where your human body went to sleep, and anything else you think was important. I’ll start.

Somebody helped me remove that page from the pad and set it down on a coffee table we were gathered around, and I wrote:

Michael MacKenzie, 1229 Palm Street. This was my makeshift sex-doll, and though I did not use it last night, it was lying beside me in bed. I tried to stop my possessed body from leaving my house, but it knocked me aside. Otherwise, the possessed bodies ignored me and I boarded the ship with them. A blue-skinned alien came around with some sort of scanner which seemed to be identifying the people, and it printed out what I think was an ID tag that went around each person’s wrist. But it identified this body as fake, and using another device, gave orders to the people next to me on the ship. I was helpless as they picked me up, carried me out, and dropped me to the ground off the side of one of those ramps.

I put this down for people to read as well, and spread around other pads and one of those who could hold pencils sent around several more pencils and those who could hold them wrote their thing. We then found ways for those who could not use a pencil to communicate. One of those ways was that we divided the top pages of two pads into 4x5 grids and wrote out the alphabet, the ten digits, and a period, comma, apostrophe, and hyphen. The small dolls could walk across the pages to spell out answers, stopping for a moment at each letter or off the pages for spaces, and the larger ones could point to the letters. This worked universally and we set up two sets of such pads with a transcriber at each one to reasonably quickly capture the stories from everybody, though most did not have as much to say as I did.

When we were done with all this, we put all the papers on the floor in a circle and walked around the circle, reading them and advancing one spot once everybody indicated they were done by raising a hand. At the end of it all, I drew a conclusion, and wrote it on another paper which I put between two of the others and signaled the group to circulate again so all could read it.

Raise your hand if you think you were transferred into the nearest person-like inanimate object which somebody else wasn’t transferred into.

This got a unanimous show of hands.

When I didn’t make another suggestion, one of the small stuffies among our group stepped forward. One of our scribes grabbed an alphabet set and a pencil and pad to write on, and he danced out his query in the middle of the circle.

Raise your hand if your body is more solid or more articulated than the object it is made of should be.

It took a few moments for people to think this one over, but everybody eventually raised a hand. The stuffies were more solid, the action figures and dolls more articulated. Nobody made action figures with individually movable fingers, but as long as the thing they were made from had fingers, they could move them separately. And there was no way the stuffed sex doll I was made of could ever have stood on its own. There was some serious magic going on, to not just move our consciousness to these dolls but also to allow us to animate them.

And they did it to steal our bodies. What kind of bodies were they in before they stole ours? Someone suggested there were some disembodied people on some other planet that similar magic was going to move into our bodies, in other words, they stole them to sell them. But if they could just move a consciousness into a manufactured thing, why didn’t they just move the others into manufactured things? Obviously, having a real body was better. These bodies were handicapped; nearly all of them could not speak, many could not hold a pencil to write, and many were terribly small.

But they’d even taken the old bodies. Two of our group used to be senior citizens, though they were healthy ones. Had they taken the old, handicapped, and sickly senior citizens? Maybe not, I realized. A lot of those people had died from COVID. It’s possible they abandoned the gravely ill, too, those who were still suffering from the virus. They are all quarantined away where we would not have seen them. If you threw out 2.5% of the worst bodies, the rest of them probably looked pretty good to somebody who did not even have a proper body.

Another stuffie suggested:

We should find a way to get online and communicate with other groups.

And another:

We should search all the houses and see if anybody was left behind.

Both good suggestions, I thought. I responded to the latter:

Or stuck. Imagine somebody’s gone into a mint-in-box figurine.

The body movements of the group suggested they were laughing. It wasn’t funny to the person who was actually stuck that way, but for now it was only a hypothetical situation.

When nobody had any more suggestions, I took the paper that mentioned getting online and showed it to the residents of the house. They understood and one of them, presumably the one most active online, raised a hand. Then I wrote out for the group:

I’m going to gather a small group here to try to get online. The rest of you, have fun, or sleep, or whatever. Who’s most dexterous? You’re going to type.

The second largest in our group, one of those roughly 3-foot-tall “walking” dolls, volunteered. This was occupied by an 11-year-old girl named Stephanie, but one who at least had some experience online. I sat in the chair in front of the computer, took my typist up on my lap, cleared off irrelevant items from the desk, brought the keyboard and mouse out to the edge of the desk, put a set of letter pads between it and the monitor, and set the resident down beside those.

The computer was already on, but locked, and when we got to the password prompt, the resident went right into spelling out the password. We figured out quickly she could raise both arms high in the air to represent a capital letter, and use the same tactic for punctuation that was shifted on other keys. There were keys not listed, though, so I took a third pad, which there was barely room for on the desk, and laid out a grid of every computer key not already represented, and I wrote the shifted symbols above everything but the letters.

It turned out to be too far for Stephanie to reach the mouse, so I moused with some help from her pointing, or from the resident standing directly in front of the monitor and pointing. We checked several web bulletin boards, some of which had no recent posts, and some of which had a few. It was then that we noticed the time. The old posts from people ended around the end of the 28th, or wee hours on the 29th. The few new posts came on the afternoon of the 30th. On one site where there were posts, we initiated a response:

Did we sleep a whole day?

However, there did not seem to be much activity. Maybe after another day or so people would get more organized, or a more thorough search could find where people were really posting.

When we returned to the group, we found that, with the two significantly larger people removed from the group, the remaining ones had arranged themselves in a circle and were playing Duck, Duck, Goose. Since we didn’t have any voices, they had adapted the game by simply making it so that the person walking outside the circle who would normally have been tapping each person and saying Duck or Goose, instead only tapped the “goose”.