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.

In the morning, Jennifer had a long set of announcements.

First off, we found there is an organized group spreading a link to a forum on Reddit called dollcrisis. They are using that as a central place for activities people are working together on. And it’s mainly about these facilities, because the other stuff like rescuing all our people and making alphabet pads for people who can’t speak, people mostly figured out already.

We had people on 5 computers going all night reading different parts of it, but I am going to try to summarize.

There’s already significant progress being made on translating some of the documents.

The whole thing is a conspiracy from some alien race to steal our bodies to extend their lives. They have some ability to move minds around, and so they moved their minds into our bodies. Under their power, minds have to move into a body, and as a side-effect of being evicted from our bodies without a particular destination being chosen, we ended up in the doll bodies we are now in.

COVID-19 is part of it. The reason it was so different from normal cold viruses is it was genetically engineered to remove a resistance certain people have to the mind transfer and also to kill off those too weak to survive the transfer. Remember 1 in 200 people around the world died? They kept that fraction of their people from dying by killing us off first.

These facilities are emitting some sort of reality-altering field which is believed responsible for us being able to animate these formerly inanimate bodies. Under normal circumstances we would only be able to move into real bodies of intelligent beings - basically humans or these aliens. There’s a panel there with dials on it, which I labeled with instructions not to touch. One of the dials on that panel shifts the field into different modes. They are still trying to understand the meanings of the modes, but they know they lost contact with some places, probably where people moved the dial, so still nobody should touch it.

Today we’re going to search the rest of the streets in our neighborhood, rescue the two people from Build-a-Bear, and search stores near some other homeless camps.

And if there is anybody here with skill translating unknown languages, go to 1326 where you’ll go around the clock helping others from around the world. We will retrieve documents for you.

“Me!” I wanted to scream, but instead I could only put both hands up in the air. But once I came forward and explained my expertise, they led me to that house. That became my July 3rd duty.

When I got started, they had already figured out the basics of the language. They brought me quickly up to speed and then it was a matter of translating documents and figuring out unknown words from context. The documents fell quickly, as most of the world’s top experts on unknown languages teamed up to decode the documents. Most of the facilities had the same set of documents, so once we had figured out the words in their titles, we used the titles to decide which documents were the most valuable to translate next. By the end of the afternoon, while we didn’t understand how what they did was even possible, we understood the effects of the reality-altering field generated by the facilities and the modes it could operate in.

They had covered the inhabited areas of the earth with cells which varied in size depending on population density, but could be as large as about 5 miles in diameter in rural areas, and could handle as many as about 5,000 people. Typical usage was about 1.5 miles in diameter, covering about 3,000 people.

The dial in the facility that Jennifer had mentioned was labeled with something akin to “reality mode” and the numbers 0 to 5. The mode it was now on in our facility, and almost everywhere, was mode 3.

• Mode 0 is stealth mode. This mode hides the facilities. Even right on top of their door, it just looks like part of the grass. The only effect facilities in this mode have on people is a don’t-notice-me command that effectively makes them invisible to us. This was initially broadcast from spacecraft in the air as their ground teams set up the facilities, but continued after they went inside, while they were studying us.
• Mode 1 is sleep mode. People who are already asleep stay asleep; those who are awake go on normally until they get tired, and once they go to sleep, they stay that way. It affects everybody in range who is not wearing one of their special transponders. There were crates full of these devices inside the facility. Most of the transponders looked unused, save for a couple in each facility, but they would have given the aliens the ability to perform an operation here with people asleep.
• Mode 2 is the mode that enables mind transfer. They needed a place for the existing minds to go, so this mode also animates all the human-like bodies in the area, though initially without any sort of minds controlling them. It keeps them asleep. It actually forces sleep, unlike mode 1. They used mode 1 first to get people in their beds, and not just falling down on the street somewhere, before going to this mode. Mind transfer, body animation, and making people sleep are three separate abilities the facilities have, but mode 2 activates all three.
• Mode 3, the current mode, maintains the animation of occupied human-like bodies, and does a bunch of other things that make life viable for beings in artificial bodies.
• Mode 4 is a kind of suspended animation. Like mode 2 and unlike mode 1, this is immediate, but it goes beyond sleep. Only people or things with those transponders attached to them can move within such an environment, save for the interior of the facilities themselves.

Among the other things mode 3 does, it works in concert with mode 4 at power plants. Somehow, mode 3 provides electricity on the lines the way the power plants would, even with no power plants present. Mode 4 puts the power plants into suspended animation. They neither consume fuel nor actually produce any electricity, but the line voltages out to the edges of their cells remain normal, and whatever the facilities are doing to provide power replaces this within the mode 3 cells. There were small cells put in place around the power plants to contain them, apart from places people lived.

There were whole other volumes explaining the technical capabilities and limits of mode 3. We had only translated the summaries of those books so far, but most of them were what we had already discovered. Mode 3 could only to a limited degree extrapolate details of the bodies that the templates, as they called them, were not supplied with. So we could open our mouths or separate our fingers if we got zapped into a doll that came with a closed mouth or fused fingers, but the mode could not give us fingers that weren’t there in the first place. It could not change the texture of our bodies to resemble skin.

There was a whole book explaining about the templates. The reason it was only for humans is that our bodies had to be programmed into the system. This allowed for great variations in bodies, but it didn’t allow dogs or gorillas into the system. But there were a number of other alien species included.

There was also mode 5. It was not documented with the other modes; it appeared that when they first designed the system, mode 5 wasn’t available and they added it on later. While mode 3 let us use these bodies within certain limits, mode 5 was supposed to give us realistic skin, give us all body parts, and even activate sexual functions, all at the price of making us have to breathe, drink, and eat. The power the facilities put out was not enough to support these other functions together with what it did in other modes. So we would have to eat and drink in that mode. Also, going to mode 5 lost the ability to simulate electricity, so cells wanting to do so had to have real operating power plants within them. That would mean we had to have real fuel supplies, unless we had some renewable system like hydro or solar plants, which did exist some places. And people would have to work to make food, unless we only did it for a short time and used food that was already around. Essentially, it made our doll bodies real, and restored the rest of the world to working normally.

Mode 5 was also labeled dangerous, experimental, and try-at-your-own-risk. We universally agreed that at least for now, there was no need to risk it. As much as I might want hands, and might (after experiencing it from the female side) decide I liked having the ability to have sex or even just masturbate, by and large we were probably better sticking with mode 3, and maybe we could open up some limited areas where mode 5 was tried, It was clearly either not reliable, or not nearly as good as having real bodies, because otherwise they would be using mode 5 with effigy bodies themselves instead of traveling who knows how far to steal another planet’s bodies.

As far as the areas that lost contact, mode 5 would lose power if the local power plant was not also changed to mode 5, mode 4 would lock everything down outside the facility, mode 2 would put them to sleep, and mode 1 did not animate the bodies and froze all the doll bodies there. If we were interpreting it correctly, it wasn’t even possible to go to mode 0 while artificial bodies were occupied, perhaps as a safeguard. Even so, pretty much anybody who’d changed the mode might have lost contact. This was super-dangerous and I felt sorry for anybody who messed with it and the people who lived in their zones. But we would want to try to figure out which regions had gotten into modes 4 or 2 and send people in wearing transponders to fix them; mode 5 just needed to switch back to 3 and they’d be OK, if it didn’t blow something up or kill everybody or whatever. It wasn’t clear if there was any way to fix the mode 1 zones without bringing in real bodies we didn’t have. Maybe remote-controlled robots.

As we went on into the night, we moved on to translating other documents. One of them was a manual for the command console in the facility, with that reality mode switch described as very dangerous. It cautioned to read the other document we had already translated before messing with it in any way. But as for the rest of the console, a big empty space was actually something like a computer screen, and it was possible to bring up a map of the cells on it showing which reality modes they were in. It was night here then, but elsewhere in the world where it was day, somebody went and checked, and came back with photos of the map in various parts of the world. It looked like there were about 100 widely scattered cells out of about 2.5 million around the world that had gone into mode 2 or mode 4. A separate message board was dedicated to recovering these cells; their neighbors would go in with transponders and reset them. Only a couple cells had gone into mode 5, and only one mode 1 and no 0s.

Areas not near the cells that had changed mode kept translating documents. So when morning arrived here, people brought me other documents from the facility to translate. The main page for the translation effort showed pictures of the cover of every document, each with its translated title and a link to a Google document where people were translating the document, and it was just a free-for-all.

But it was still possible to find material that had not been translated, and in one such document, I discovered where our bodies were going. It was a planet 100 light years from here, and they do not have faster-than-light travel; they put the bodies into mode 1 sleep on board the ship during a high-acceleration phase, and then into mode 4 suspended animation while the ship streaked across space at about 1/4 light speed, which was for whatever reason considered the fastest that was safe to travel with people in suspended animation. They do have faster-than-light communication, and it is apparently possible to initiate them from the facilities, but we don’t know anybody out there we want to talk to.

The recipients for our bodies had been near death and moved to doll-type bodies as temporary homes before they would be transferred to our bodies. They would wake up in the distant future on their original home world but in new bodies and alive. They had requested 50 billion bodies and were raiding the entire populations of several other planets to achieve the goal, ones which they had identified as viable to live on that planet. It wasn’t clear how so many of them were in trouble at once. But unless the aliens had left more ships behind, we had no chance to catch our bodies. They were gone. We’d better get used to the ones we had.

My group took short breaks to assemble in the park with the entire population, now so large Jennifer had to speak using a PA system for everybody to hear. We had access to all kinds of things in the mall and had acquired one there. So we heard about the hundreds more people recovered as they finished exploring the houses, a couple more mannequins in nearby businesses, and reports from the rest of the internet team about missions to restore the mode 2 and 4 zones.

They had made contact with the mode 5 cells, too. To say that mode activated sexual functions was an understatement; it had turned into a massive orgy. The rescuers had had to wear the transponders to avoid being affected, but then they walked unhindered into the facilities in those two zones and switched them back to mode 3, leading all the people to wonder what had gotten over them. The rescuers gave those people an explanation. Now we knew just how broken mode 5 was and why it wasn’t a solution for the recipients of our stolen bodies.

While it was going to be a few more weeks before I and the rest of the internet team finished translating all the material our visitors had left behind, the big question was what we were going to do. But the rest of the group found a lot of things that needed doing.

One thing was about all the now-stray dogs and cats. It wasn’t really safe for most of us to own dogs and cats now, and they needed food nobody was making. Some of them could adapt to life in the wild, but we didn’t want them roaming the streets little dolls traveled in. Twice our group had had to drive one away from the park, and they were suspected to have torn apart a couple dolls on the first morning we awoke in these bodies. There were two real options, encourage them to relocate to wilderness areas where they could live off wild animals they could capture and eat, or euthanize them. That was sad, but it needed to be done. We attempted to drive them off, but we had the syringes to humanely destroy ones who would not stay away.

A number of the houses had small issues that needed fixing, such as plumbing leaks or roof leaks. We had a few people with both the know-how and the bodies to do such work, and they had a punch-list of 30 homes in our cell that had such jobs to do. Once done, they retired from that job. They kept their tools on hand in case they were needed again, but apparently the simulated state the world was in kept things from wearing out, and they were not needed.

A couple months after our bodies were stolen, the documents were all translated, the animals were taken care of, and our living environments were secure. The next thing to do was fix our bodies.

By this point, it was understood how to use mode 2 to perform controlled transfers of one specific mind from one body to another. From the console, one mode activated the screen showing all minds and all possible bodies in an area, and let you move any mind to another body. In cases like mine, they would transfer me out, sew some gloves onto the body I’d made, and transfer me back, and I’d have usable hands. People in stuffed animals who didn’t like it could get transferred into action figures. People who wanted to be the other gender could get swapped into bodies of that gender.

There were tons of potential bodies around; in the typical household, even one without kids, there tended to be several, not to mention two toy stores within our cell just chock full of brand new ones. Even though our bodies were 80% female because of the great number of such dolls in the world, there were enough male ones for those who insisted on being male. Most of the people, though, had gotten to like their body, even if it was not the gender they started out as, and stuck with it, only getting it altered to add functionality.

There was no real need to wear clothing, but nearly all the dolls started out wearing something, and people seemed to like it. But that clothing got dirty over time, not from body fluids like with human bodies, but just from the environment. We washed them, in many cases, but not all the doll clothing was made to be washable. To wash some of the smallest doll clothes, we put them into mesh bags designed for washing small items.

But we wanted everybody to have more than one set of clothes available. We raided the toy stores for every piece of doll clothing available, and raided a fabric store for fabrics, thread, needles, etc. for some of the more agile people to make more clothing. The people in full-sized bodies had no shortage of clothes available; people volunteered their old clothes and a size/height/weight/gender/address database was set up, so everybody could collect a wardrobe of clothes that fit them, in addition to freely raiding the new clothes off the racks of stores. Every person, of whatever size, had a “bedroom” usually set up in an actual bedroom, but nobody slept there; it was where they stored their clothes. Bedrooms for small people held several people depending on the sizes of the people and the room, with designated areas for each person.

Once everybody was comfortable in their bodies, which took less than a week after we started fixing up the bodies, people were able to come up with ways for people to play all manner of games, in person or online, in small groups or large. We made a map of which games were where and every house in the neighborhood had a purpose, most of them for playing some game.

In the slightly longer term, we worked to give more people voices. All any body needed to talk was to have a speaker embedded within it. The people who were talking were simply vibrating the speaker cones to make sound, and not using any other circuitry that may have been attached to them. Speaker cones were easy to come by! There was a mall with thousands of devices containing speaker cones, and pretty much every person owned at least one set of headphones or other devices from which speakers could be extracted. For small stuffed bodies the size of typical stuffed animals, for the people who’d been content to stay in such bodies (usually after getting them modified to have hands with fingers), the small speakers from earbud-type headphones worked. Barbie-type dolls got one placed inside their hollow heads, and if they disassembled the earbud to take out just the tiny speaker cone, it would even fit into the hollow chest cavity of GI Joe sized action figures. They’d have fairly quiet voices, but it worked to speak with the other small bodies who were sitting a foot away while playing some kind of small game. For bodies my size, they used larger speakers from full-size headphones, already obsolete land-line telephones, computer speakers,  stereo systems, etc. Three weeks after we started fixing the bodies, I got my voice, and in another two weeks every body that had any hollow space whatsoever to embed a speaker cone into had a voice, and the remaining people had opted into bodies that could be made to have voices.

Months after we had settled into a carefree life of just having fun 24/7, we heard another report from the zones that had gone into mode 5. Even though they’d only been in mode 5 for a day, some 5% of the females had gotten pregnant. Even though we didn’t eat, drink, or breathe now, the ones who got pregnant stayed pregnant and grew correspondingly. The pregnancies all seemed to be proceeding at a regular human pace, so nine months after it all started, we’d have a whole bunch of dolls giving birth to... something. Live human bodies? More dolls? Ultimately it turned out to be doll bodies. They came with their own souls, though.

Apparently, if we wanted to reproduce all we had to do was go to mode 5 for a little while. But we didn’t. We didn’t need to. Remember how things didn’t wear out? Our bodies didn’t, either. Except for rare cases where a body was destroyed by some accident, or animals, nobody died. Nobody aged, either. If you were in a doll that looked like a baby, you were a baby forever, unless you switched to some other body via mode 2.

What we now faced was immortality. Once you have it, what do you do with it? How do you keep life interesting, forever?

People invented new games, wrote new books, sang new songs, every form of entertainment we’d had in the world before. We even had sports, though we had to make separate leagues for different body types. So there was GI Joe football, Barbie basketball, Cabbage Patch soccer, about forty different body type designations in all with a least a couple sports that could be adapted for each. The mannequins, sex dolls like me, and other bodies that qualified as human-sized made up the “premier” league, and we played every sport, though most found they were best at one or two of them and focused on those.

The large number of different body type leagues meant most cells had one or two teams for each team sport per league, and we’d travel a mile or two to play teams from neighboring cells. Needing to improvise on balls meant they weren’t very standard and could never form a serious league, but it was all for fun anyway. Smaller bodies could not make the long journeys as easily, but we’d load entire teams into a wagon or pushcart and one large person could take them there. For some small body types, there were enough for two teams within the cell and they could play each other more frequently instead of traveling.

Our carpenters made miniature stadiums for doll-people to watch other doll-people play their sports. Multiple stadiums, since sports were adapted to different dimensions for 4-inch, 8-inch, 12-inch, 16-inch, 2-foot, 3-foot, and full-sized people, in addition to different sports having different playing fields. The smallest stadiums were all indoors, built into a large room of a house or in the mall, because the small balls were too susceptible to being blown off course by the wind when thrown or kicked through the air.

When autumn came, we all set up schools to continue our children’s education. We had the old schools, of course, but most of the children were now small dolls instead of human-sized people, and the old classrooms were not equipped well. But we improvised. Families with kids moved to the houses closest to the schools, and we set up two tracks within each school, classes for 3-foot-tall or larger people, which used normal sized classrooms, and classes for smaller dolls, which used rooms that had been sectioned off within a couple rooms near a school entrance. In both cases, classrooms were set up with smaller desks for smaller people in front, and larger ones behind.

The mode 5 cells ended up having to set up special schools to educate all the orgy children when they reached school age, because they had many more children of that age than other ages. These children went to the same classrooms all the time, and in some cases had classes taught remotely from teachers from other cells who had nobody left to teach. These children grew until they reached adulthood, producing a body of the same size and type as their mother’s, though unlike our original dolls, 50% of them were male. When the mode 5 cell kids graduated from high school, the schools closed. There were no more children to educate, with even the infants having graduated.