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.

With eternity to explore, improve our bodies, and learn, we did everything. Hundreds of new games were invented and shared over the internet, using equipment that could be easily acquired.

We had thought we’d never use mode 5 again, but one of the cells organized a “safe” mode 5 day. Everybody was arranged into same-sex groups in the houses. People were given the opportunity to change into bodies of the other sex before the event if they liked, and optionally to change back afterward. Even then, it was not for everybody. Those who did not want to participate were given transponders to be immune to the effect and served as monitors, ensuring nobody switched houses and possibly got someone pregnant. They got two hours of fun and then turned the effect off, changed back the people who wanted to change into their original bodies, and cleaned up any messes they made.

This led us to try our own session. I opted to stay female, since it meant having sex with other females, and I loved it. The sensations my female body got were different and weird but great. But there were drawbacks. We didn't have fresh food, and even with a two-hour session, some people were getting hungry at the end of it. Some people didn't want to admit what they ate, but fortunately the hunger went away when we went back to mode 3. Some didn't like the loss of control while we were in mode 5. One person expressed her opposition to it by saying, "That was something associated with our old bodies, but we've moved beyond that." So it was a one-time thing. We continued doing all the other things we had been doing.

Some scholars took the entire set of translated alien documents and used them to determine the full story behind why our bodies were stolen. This was widely distributed online, and while little was required of any person by this time, this was considered required reading. There were public readings of the story in many places to make it easier for the small bodies.

A space-faring race encountered a pandemic which spread among most of their worlds before they understood what they were up against. They had no cure for this virus that infected their immune cells first, and from there, wrote itself into the DNA of every body cell. The mechanism that was supposed to generate replacement body cells was hijacked to make more viruses instead. As a result, not only did they become virus factories, but as their cells wore out, the bodies started to fail from various causes, and quickly.

They ultimately determined there was only one solution to save the race: They contacted a species who had the ability to move minds and hired them to get them replacement bodies. They were all moved into doll bodies like we are now, but those were temporary bodies.

The price for 50 billion replacement bodies was one planet. The full populations of several worlds were affected, and several billion of their people had perished before the initial transfer could occur, so there was space for the people of one planet to be relocated to fill in within their other planets. The mind-movers moved the doll bodies from that planet to homes on the other planets whose occupants had died. Then those planets were put into mode 1 sleep, and aliens with the transponders burned all the infected bodies and essentially fumigated the entire worlds to destroy any last traces of the infection. Once that was done, the worlds were put into mode 4 suspended animation.

It was the mind-moving species who came to Earth, alone. The residents of the infected worlds did not know they were getting stolen bodies, only new ones. The mind-movers were a very prolific and expansionist species, and they brought on board each ship enough of their own kind in tiny doll bodies to take over enough humans, or the residents of whichever other world they went to, to fill the ship. This was how they fulfilled their contract. They brought our bodies to one of the worlds the afflicted race lived on that was best suited for our bodies, and bodies from other worlds they had raided like ours to other worlds. They moved the people out of their temporary bodies and into the stolen ones. The mind-movers are, however, limited by the speed of light, and it will take centuries for our bodies to get there.

The afflicted species didn’t know that the affliction was of the mind-movers’ own creation. They had designed that plague to target that species specifically, just as they had designed COVID to kill off the weak bodies among ours and to send us into self-quarantine to allow them to set up their facilities on Earth. So they likewise had the cure. On board the ships, before our bodies were put into suspended animation, they administered the cure.

Another part of the plan was that the mind-movers were going to send colony ships back to Earth and the other vacated planets. It wasn’t clear when they were coming, but they were coming. Unlike humans had done in many places, they didn’t exercise population control. Instead, when their planets got too full, they simply shipped off some of the people to another planet, one they had acquired under contract, or one whose people they had removed or killed. As a result of their mind-moving, they occupied bodies of a number of different species. Their colony would come here when a species compatible with Earth had overfilled their world.

Strangely, they seemed to assume that we would never notice the facilities, and that we would not survive. But we had discovered the facilities. We learned their language. We learned how to use the facilities due to the copious documentation, apparently meant to help the vast numbers of their own people who had to install and use these facilities to steal our bodies, that they had left behind as unneeded once they had our bodies.

Earth did not, prior to the aliens’ arrival, have any way to detect or track their ships, which used a variant of the technology in the facilities to evade conventional detection methods. But the facilities did have the ability to detect their ships. The advance forces who set up the facilities used that ability to prepare for the ships’ arrival and put us to sleep at an appropriate time. If we were vigilant, we would see them months or maybe even years in advance of their arrival.

That is what the scholars asked us to do now. Stay vigilant. Maintain a rotation, among those of us large enough to use the equipment in the facilities, so that once a day a particular set of sensors in each facility was being checked, and a particular internet board was being checked to learn of detections elsewhere.

So we did. We had enough large bodies by this point that each of us only had to work a couple days a year, but we had a schedule. Each of us knew our next day to serve and each of us found the next person to serve after we had done our service, to remind them.

And we waited. And waited. Years, decades, and centuries passed. But we were vigilant. Sometimes, people forgot their times to serve, but with so many of us involved, someone would remember and restart the watch. And indeed, sometimes our bodies did wear out, but we kept spare bodies on hand. Due to the way things didn’t age normally in mode 3, spare bodies that remained in storage remained as good as new even centuries later. When someone’s body was damaged, they were either moved to a new one, or moved to a temporary one while their old body was repaired. Like the ship of Theseus, which was replaced board by board to repair damage so that none of the original wood remained at the end of its mission, one by one we replaced or repaired our bodies so that eventually nothing remained of the set of bodies we were at first imprisoned in, but we were still the same people.

Even as we had to replace our bodies, we remained vigilant. Eventually, we saw them. First one, then three, then eleven, then a thousand, and soon more than a million colony ships filled a part of space headed for Earth, and it was plain to anybody checking the sensors in the facilities that a colonization fleet was on its way.

We all knew we needed to do something, but what we were supposed to do had not been communicated a millennium ago when we were all set to watch for them. But when we checked the board on the internet, we saw something surprising.

Our leaders, the presidents, prime ministers, kings, and other such leaders of dozens of the countries of the world, were still waiting. Ordinarily, those leaders would have been replaced hundreds of times over, but when we all stopped doing our old jobs, considering them irrelevant, we also neglected to choose new leaders. They had little to do when local groups had banded together almost everywhere, as we had, to lead ourselves, but they had stayed in communication with one another. Those who had not survived, or had abdicated this responsibility, were represented by subordinates or ambassadors or the like, such as Vice President Pence of the United States.

They had had a thousand years to develop plans for what we could do when the aliens came back, and now they were communicating that plan to all of us. The aliens were, by everything we had translated from the material they had left behind, expecting to come in here and find the place vacant.

The solution was simple. Instead of watching the sensors once a day, we were going to have people in the facilities continuously watching the arrival of the ships. When they landed, we would switch the facilities into mode 2. The aliens must be affected by the modes of the facilities as much as we were, because why else would they have needed the transponders to allow certain people to avoid being put to sleep or in suspended animation? Then we could transfer them out of the bodies they arrived in into bodies of our choice, chosen to be their prisons.

Each zone was to obtain a supply of mint-in-package action figures and dolls to be the prisons. We had rescued a handful of the locals from these packages when we first awoke as dolls, as they were held so tightly inside them that they could not exert enough force to escape, and we didn’t then know how to use mode 2 to move their minds to other bodies. Every toy store had enough of these to supply one or more for each resident of one cell. A number of those who had been collectors during their human lives had many more inside their homes. Not every cell had a toy store, but there were more than enough to go around.

We did have a toy store due to having the mall here, so we were a supplier rather than a seeker. Some of the neighboring cells came to us to obtain suitable numbers of these prisons. In other cells, they first collected them from people’s houses, and if they failed to find enough, went looking to cells like ours who had them in excess.

There were somewhat more ships than in the fleet that had stolen our bodies, and we assumed they were ships of the same design, and there would be correspondingly more bodies. It was likely they would use the same landing spots as they had used originally, so that meant some cells would get two ships. So the target was to gather two prison dolls per person, and we set aside that number and left the remainder to be distributed to neighboring cells who needed them. We put our dolls in a locked shipping container outside one of the stores. Even if they got out of their packages, they’d never get out of the steel container.

In my cell, we drew up a new schedule. We had 8 hour shifts to ensure we stayed alert, two of us at a time, so we served six times as frequently as before, roughly once a month. Anyone else interested could watch the reports posted to the Internet.

At first there wasn’t a whole lot to report. They were coming. They were still coming. Eventually we could estimate the date they would arrive by calculating the rate at which they would have to decelerate. As that date approached, people reported on the way the ships spread out around the planet. Eventually we could see that all the ships would land during the daylight hours of May 6, 3030 in the Americas and May 7, 3030 in the rest of the world.

We could already see the ship overhead that was descending to land in our park in the late morning of the 6th when we got the first reports from other landing sites, who reported everything worked as we had planned. Those first reports also provided the first sightings of the bodies that were coming. They were described as “hideous insectoid creatures.” They were most definitely not the kind of alien who detected me as an intruder when I tried to stow away about the ship here before they left with our bodies.

After a thousand years in doll bodies that we’d had opportunities to customize or trade to our liking, nearly all of us were not eager to switch back to live bodies. There were some who would have done so if the arriving bodies looked nice, and there was a plan to set up zones for those people to live in. There was no chance of that now. We were going to lock up the arriving aliens for an eternity and probably burn the bodies.

The one ship landing here descended toward our park just after 11 AM. All our large bodies wore the transponders, ready to fight if needed, but things went according to plan. They landed, then turned off their facility by switching to mode 0. This exposed them to our facility, which was in mode 3, as they expected... but as soon as we confirmed we could see them under our facility’s control, we switched to mode 2.

There were three people on their ship with transponders. We assumed this was the crew actually flying the ship. We quickly transferred the people closest to them on board the ship into the doll bodies in our prison, and transferred our own people into those bodies. We quickly flipped back to mode 3, and our people removed the transponders from the crew. Once that was done, we could continue the transfer of alien minds into the prison. It took hours to do this and confirm all the alien minds were in the prison and none of ours were.

Next, four hundred of our volunteers were transferred into aliens on the ship. We had, in advance, set up wood for a bonfire in the parking lot of the mall, since we didn’t want to burn our park. The easiest way to get the bodies there was to walk them down there under their own power. Not everybody wanted to be an alien even for a little while, but those who did mastered the walk in these bodies by the time they finished the first trip, and the remaining trips took half the time. It was surreal seeing the parade of scorpion-like bodies marching down the road. Scorpion-like, that is, if scorpions were five feet long, two feet wide, and about three inches thick over much of their bodies, though their shape meant parts of their bodies were a foot and a half off the ground. We switched back and forth between mode 3 for the walks and mode 2 to transfer the volunteers to more bodies until all the bodies were stacked on top of the wood pile.

We got everybody back in their right bodies. The volunteers for the walks had earned their rest. Then we prepared for the fire brigade. They would both set the fire and make sure it didn’t go out of control. Lighting the fire was tricky, because modes 2, 3, and 4 wouldn’t allow fires to easily light, mode 1 didn’t provide life to our bodies, and mode 0 would have meant evacuating the zone. This meant we had to use mode 5. Everybody involved in the operation was wearing transponders to be immune to the effect, and everybody else was isolated in same-sex groups in the homes which we had also stocked with food produced during the prep time. They would have fun, but nobody would get pregnant.

Two of the fire brigade went to the edge of the woodpile and worked to light ends of the wood at the edges, then stood back. Dozens more stood ready with the area’s firefighting gear, unneeded for centuries, ready to put it out if things got out of control. Part of our preparation had been to set this gear up and test it. But it wasn’t needed. The fire burned and burned until both the wood and the alien bodies became a heap of ash, and we set the zone back to mode 3.

Other nearby zones gave similar reports, as this plan had been widely shared, though it was implemented differently in some places. However, things did not go so smoothly around the rest of the world. Before the ships started landing on the west coast of the United States and Canada, they had caught on to what was happening. They hung back, staying out in space but low enough to make the large ships visible from the ground. It wasn’t clear what their plan was going to be. We worried that they had weapons of some sort, transponders for the ship’s entire complement of passengers, or something of that sort. But apparently they had no such thing.

After about a two hour delay, they started bringing the ships down, hard. Instead of landing normally, they started crashing the ships directly into the facility doors, apparently trying to destroy the facilities. This failed; the facilities were designed to withstand almost anything, especially in the modes like mode 3 where fires would not start after such impacts. But it made a huge mess, and whoever was manning those facilities had to remain inside while the people outside worked to clean things up. This continued all the way around the world.

It was over, but it wasn’t over. It took the residents of those zones months to remove the wreckage of the ships and clear the doors to the facilities. And we knew the aliens wouldn’t take this sitting down. The fact that some of their ships realized their plan had gone wrong no doubt meant they had sent messages back to the rest of their people across the galaxy. They would return.

Assuming they had not developed faster-than-light capability, we would still have many years to prepare. But they could take as long as they wanted to prepare as well. We considered several strategies they could attempt:

• They could bring transponders for everyone on each ship. This would prevent us from moving them out of their bodies. We had no idea how they made the transponders or whether it was possible for them to make so many. This was less than an order of magnitude more than they had left in the facilities on Earth, though, so we assumed it was possible.
• They could bring ships with weapons. Using their ships as improvised bombs didn’t work, but on their planet, they might have or be able to build weapons they could put on a ship that could disable the facilities.
• They could have devices to override our local control of the facilities. There was nothing like that described in the copious documentation, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
• They could send armed troops equipped with transponders out of their ships to seize control of the facilities before we could transfer all their people.

We could try to develop weapons of our own, but we had been living in a mode dependent on the facilities. Could we revive the heavy industries of a thousand years ago to make development of such weapons possible?

There was another area for research as well. When they originally left with our bodies, they didn’t leave ships behind. Now, we had control of about one hundred sixty thousand of their ships that landed in the initial few hours of their attempted colonization before word spread among their ships still in orbit that something was going wrong. We weren’t sure what this would do, but it represented a lot of power. Even with no weapons, we had mobile facilities that could go anywhere and override control of the ground facilities, at least, in the space on board the ships, for a while. It was clear that wouldn’t work indefinitely, or else they would have done it. But it could be part of a strategy.