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 sent people to explore the empty ships right away. And we found... more documentation. In the parts of the world needing cleanup over the facilities, all the large bodies capable of helping with the cleanup were deployed that way. But here, I was free to participate in another document translation effort.

The insectoids apparently used a dialect of the same language as the beings who stole our bodies. What we had learned from the language of those documents made it easy to translate these.

But where the facilities had had documentation of every aspect of their body-stealing operation, including the facilities and the reality-altering modes they imposed over their environment, these ships were intended to transplant their entire society. They had everything. There were massive digital archives of every sort on board the ships. If the commanders of those ships knew what they were doing, they should have ordered the ships in space to crash into the intact ships on the ground.

But we found that they didn’t, because this mission was being run by the beings from the insectoids’ home planet only. The main forces of the mind-moving aliens were involved in a huge war against people who had learned to fight them.

We pieced together the history of the insectoids. They were a captured species. The original insectoids had refused to deal with the mind-movers, and the mind-movers had attacked and destroyed them. Two thousand years ago, only a few million of their population of ten billion remained. The mind-movers put the minds of some of their retired elderly into the remaining insectoids, because the mind-movers’ native species couldn’t live on that planet. They used a dialect of their original language, adapted to the speech capabilities of the insectoid bodies.

Those people reproduced until about three hundred years ago, when they had over twenty billion insectoids and were outgrowing the planet. It took them a century to build two million colony ships and two more centuries to travel here. They had lost that entire fleet, so even assuming they could build another fleet, we had at least three centuries to prepare.

They had no warships available, because those ships were all fighting the war elsewhere. There was only a minimal defensive fleet on the planet. They might build weapons to arm a fleet, but the insectoids had less incentive to even build another fleet. They had adapted to zero population growth, and then reduced their population by half when sending them here. They had spent massive resources building the first fleet, and the ongoing war meant they were unlikely to be able to bring in outside resources to build another. It was likely they had stuck with the zero population growth even after sending their people here. Even if they did send another fleet, now that they knew Earth was populated and defended, they might choose another planet. We had a huge database of their known planets, with information about the occupants, if any, of many of them. Earth was listed as captured and vacant in this database. That was what they wrongly expected, a world free for the taking.

We couldn’t be sure about their decision to crash into the facilities, since all the ships involved in that effort had been destroyed, but it was likely the crews of those ships couldn’t contact their military leaders because of the ongoing war. They had to make a decision on their own.

We did learn that the ships arriving here indeed had very limited resources. The ships didn’t have enough fuel left to reach any other suitable planet, though they weren’t completely out. They could recharge, but doing so was limited in space. They used a gravity-based power system unlike anything people on Earth had ever developed. The higher the gravity, the greater their ability to charge batteries that ran everything. The facilities were powered in the same way. Given enough time, the ships resting here on Earth would be recharged to the point of being able to travel back to their home planet, but in orbit they would charge more slowly.

This was all far better than we expected. We were still subject to possible retribution eventually, but they were preoccupied with an active war that involved worlds they actively occupied. So we had plenty of time to develop industry, and to discover possible weapon technologies from the massive databases on board the ships. But it meant a change in our lifestyle. We could no longer fool around. Everybody needed to be productive. It wasn’t like we all needed to work full-time jobs, but we couldn’t afford to have 90% of us not working at all, and most of the rest not even working enough that, back before we all became dolls, we wouldn’t have even considered it a part-time job.

Surprisingly, just asking “Who wants to work to help save our planet?” got more than enough volunteers. A lot of them were in bodies too small to really help, so the first order of business was to make more human-sized bodies. We’d given away most of those to people who wanted them already, but some people had already started the business of making replacement human-sized bodies. The mannequins were the best, most agile and human-like. There was one mannequin factory that we had managed to begin operating, together with a plastic recycling business nearby to provide materials. Plastic wasn’t just sitting around everywhere because we hadn’t been making it, but at the same time, there was a lot of unrecycled plastic that remained from the time we had become dolls.

But part of what we had discovered was that you could make the bodies out of anything. Where there were forests, people carved body parts out of wood and used metal fittings from hardware stores to join them. Where there were beaches, people sculpted with sand. People had used what might have been considered scrap material, such as the cardboard from boxes, to make bodies. Different materials gave bodies with different properties. The sand bodies, for instance, were quite heavy, and when animated, they were amazingly strong.

We also needed leadership. The leaders who had surprised most of us by showing they were still leading their countries when the insectoid colony ships showed up worked to establish hierarchical leadership. In the United States, that meant having governors within each state, mayors of cities, and ward chairs or the like in regions of large cities overseeing the neighborhood leaders within each zone, or proxies where those people were no longer present or unwilling to take the roles. Most of the neighborhood leaders weren’t elected officials. They were simply the people who had stepped up in the time of crisis. They were people who had proven themselves to be good leaders by making their zones livable and helping people live better lives.

The world leaders worked together to figure out what kinds of weapons might be useful to repel an invasion fleet from the mind-movers and which of those could actually be built. There were thousands of suggestions, and even the wacky ones were considered to see if we could make them work. They didn’t have to be missiles to shoot into space to destroy enemy spaceships. Suggestions to figure out how we could extend our planetary reality-modifying facilities to affect the crews of ships in space before they even landed, and to determine whether it was possible to override or disable the transponders to affect even their wearers were taken seriously, and somewhere in the world that research was being done.

We also relocated people and/or bodies. The place where they could build sand bodies was not necessarily the place sand bodies would be most useful. Internal combustion engines didn’t work properly in mode 3, but electric vehicles were fine, and the electrical infrastructure still worked. With no traffic on the roads, we could cross continents in a matter of days. It was unfortunate that we did not have more of these vehicles, but we had enough. Typically one driver transported three or four bodies from a place that manufactured them to a place where they needed them. Thanks to the effective hierarchical leadership, we could determine where we wanted to move them. In some cases we first drove cars in empty from other areas. Using the intact landing craft from the insectoids would have been more effective, but they were low on power and we needed to learn to fly them first. By the time we could fly them, we had already transported all the bodies.

In a few years we’d built all the bodies needed for those who wanted to help, and moved them, and we simply had to go do the things. Well, no, it wasn’t simple at all. About half the people were trying to figure out how to do things we knew how to do in the past but that depended on infrastructure that wasn’t functioning. What was the minimum we needed to do in order to manufacture some amount of weaponry? The others were researching completely new things.

There were numerous facilities in desolate places where all the people had moved out to live in other zones with more people in them. We used these for different kinds of experimentation. How did the facilities even work? No idea. They didn’t operate according to any scientific principle understood by mankind, and none of the recovered documents we had translated had an explanation. But we did find some documents that explained how some aspects of the system operated.

There were some heavily protected controls that set the power and range for each facility. We figured out how to adjust these, the trade-off between the area affected by a facility and the number of people, amount of electrical power, etc. that the facility could handle. Where the ranges overlapped, if the power was the same, the closest facility won out. A simple mathematical problem let us determine where the cell boundaries would be for given range settings. But the 5-mile-diameter ones were at the maximum distance. We could only extend the range of a facility to just over a 2.5 mile radius from the facility itself, including upward. This meant that we wouldn’t be able to affect flying ships with our ground facilities until they were well down into the atmosphere. Even then, as long as they had their on-board facilities in any mode other than mode 0, they would override our ground facilities unless they were practically sitting on top of them.

A more fruitful result came from understanding the transponders. The facilities normally excluded from relevant modes all people wearing any detected transponder at all of the type they used. But it was possible to put facilities into a secure mode where only a list of authorized transponders would be recognized. Entry onto this list was based on a serial number each transponder sent out. This meant that we could set facilities up in a way where our people could be excluded but invaders could be made to sleep even if they were wearing transponders. It worked in trial runs. Whether it would work against a real invader we would only be able to tell once we encountered one. In theory, this would allow us to freeze invaders in place and transfer them to “prison” bodies, even if they had learned what we did before and arrived all equipped with transponders.

But the time never came. Instead, after a century of preparation, we received a transmission sent to our facilities by the insectoids. We had realized such messages were possible, since we had translated all the documents left behind, but nobody out there had ever wanted to contact us, and besides the insectoids, nobody may have even realized we were here. The message was sent to every facility on Earth, and our leaders immediately sent out orders not to individually respond. Instead, we would send a worldwide greeting in response. Plenty of people knew their language well, and it was quickly translated:

We hope you can read this. We expect that you can, since you learned how to use the facilities, and we know the documentation for those is in a language quite similar to our own.

We did not mean any harm. We came to your world believing it was vacant. We apologize for our intrusion. We do not intend to return.

The military branch of our civilization is having a difficult time in a war. We are probably safe, as we are far from the front. You are safer still.

Please respond to this message. Once you do, we will send more information.

After this, there were instructions for how to respond specifically to whoever had sent the message, but it was clear it was someone with the insectoids. They were the only ones who had intruded on us.

Our leaders sent a simple “Thank you. Apology accepted.” The followup read:

We apologize for taking so long to contact you after our colonization attempt that was mistaken for an attack. Our leaders had no real agreement how to respond after we learned our colonization attempt failed.

There were warmongers who wanted to attack and reclaim what they saw as one of our planets. That response was simply not possible. Our warships were all involved in a war far away and the war leaders there did not even know what we had done.

There were those who wanted to send out probes and learn who occupied the world. There were those who wanted to send messages like the ones we have sent recently. There were those who wanted to ignore your world completely.

We did send out light-speed probes which reported back to us recently that the dominant life forms were artificial beings. This matched with one of our possible theories that your minds somehow survived the theft of your bodies by another branch of our people. We apologize for that, too, on their behalf. They are the ones involved in the war, who do not know that this communication is occurring.

Two events led to a recent change in the leadership of our world. One was the response from the probes. The other was that the war was looking grim. Our side has evacuated whole worlds, including ones closer to us than your world, and suitable for us to expand into, should we ever need to again, though that is not a current need. Our own world’s population, halved due to the failed colonization effort, was halved again by conscription to fight in the war, and we are growing it back slowly. But conscription is happening no longer, as we have declared ourselves independent from them and vowed to fight back if they come seeking more soldiers.

Despite all this, our former side in the war is not losing. The other side has suffered even worse losses, and what is taking place now is best characterized as raiding. Both sides are sending out small, fast fleets attempting to destroy the remaining planetary resources of the other. We are watching out for those fleets to visit us, but unlike planets in the war zone, we still have our defensive fleet intact. We will keep you updated.

We would like to consider you as trading partners with us, though we are not sure what resources you have that we may need or vice versa. You have many of our colony ships which could easily be fitted to serve as cargo ships, and we have some such ships as well. Even if no trade is possible due to the distance and lack of matching resources, we would hope to maintain peace with you.

The response our leaders agreed to send read:

Thank you again for the additional information. It is sad to hear that so much destruction and death has occurred in the war, but as you now understand, we lost all our bodies. We have learned to live with these after discovering that our bodies were headed far, far away with no way to chase after them.

We no longer desire to get those bodies back, though we know at best we would be getting back the bodies of the distant descendants of our original bodies. Your former allies took our bodies, but gave us eternal life and other abilities.

We still have your colonizers imprisoned, the ones who did not crash-land, anyway. After your landing here, we put them into artificial bodies which are held in prisons they cannot escape from. We destroyed their bodies. The bodies they are now in are much smaller than your bodies, but many of us live in bodies of that size and we manage, with a few larger bodies helping with some tasks.

We are not willing to share our world with them, but we are willing to send them to another world if you can tell us where we should send them. It would have to be a world with facilities, so perhaps another where the bodies were taken, if the residents were not as successful as us in surviving.

We need very little, as the facilities you are no doubt aware of make most things unnecessary, and make things tend not to wear out. We have many leftover resources from our old civilization we have made effective use of. What we can most use are certain metals we use in making batteries and other devices to make our lives easier. And we would be glad to have your people removed from our world rather than remaining imprisoned eternally here.

A list of the metals followed. They responded:

That will take some time, because our planet has been stripped clean of those metals, too, for the war effort. We can send miners to gather them from elsewhere and bring them to you. It will take a long time, due to the travel time on top of the mining time.

We would gladly trade an equivalent volume of metals, in the proportions you suggest, for the bodies our people are currently in. Please estimate their total volume for us. Please use the interior cabin space of one of our colony ships that now rests on your world as a volume unit in this calculation, so that there is no confusion on units.

This prompted a call for inventories of just what bodies we had put their people into, so that we could estimate the volumes properly. So here in my own cell, as well as in all the other occupied cells around the portion of the Americas where the insectoids landed cleanly, we collected and sent inventories of all the occupied bodies. They were almost all action figures, but some were of different sizes. We didn’t try to estimate the volumes ourselves; our leaders had access to unoccupied instances of most action figures for doing that, and merely needed the numbers and types.

They had arrived on 160,000 or so ships, but the cabins they arrived in were only about 2% occupied by bodies, and those bodies were shrunken by a factor of more than a thousand, so the resulting volume was slightly less than three ships. Still, this was a huge amount of metal, more than enough to replace all the rechargeable batteries in all the devices on Earth. We sent them the number, and they told us they were working on obtaining and sending the metals and would take away the bodies on the ships the metal arrived in.

The insectoids became our friends and galactic pen pals after this, and we were able to learn much more about the other species in the galaxy through them. At one point, they obtained and forwarded to us a report from the planet where our bodies ended up. The species that had our bodies was actually one of their mind-movers’ opponents in the war, so they did not have access to all their documents. This report was written in the language of the mind-movers because it was part of a declaration of war sent to the mind-movers, and the mind-movers had translated it from the other species’ language into their own. It was this translated copy the insectoids had gained access to. This meant we knew how to translate it ourselves. Some parts were suspect after double translation, but this is the version we sent out for the public on Earth to read.

We awoke after our long sleep, on what we simply declared to be day one of our new calendar. We quickly realized something was very wrong. It was our understanding that we would be getting lab-grown cloned bodies, and that they would be of a different species because our old bodies were all infected by a virus that was hard to guarantee being fully removed without destroying every body cell. In fact, you would do exactly that to remove the virus from our world while we were asleep in artificial temporary bodies.

Lab-grown bodies would have come out uniform in age, probably just at full adulthood, with exceptions for people who were originally children getting younger bodies to live out their childhoods. We do understand cloning, though we do not have the technology to keep the clones from developing mentally so other minds can be inserted into them at the appropriate time. But these bodies came in a variety of ages, as if a whole civilization’s bodies had been appropriated for us. We appreciated getting healthy bodies, but what happened to their old occupants? Was it a galactic pyramid scheme to go around stealing one species’ bodies to pay off another? Was the whole virus a ruse, a fraud that you [the mind-movers] removed from our bodies after removing our minds from them, in order to sell our bodies to another civilization elsewhere? Or did you commit mass murder on our behalf?

The species whose bodies we acquired is outside of our own knowledge, and we know not where to find them. If, as we suspect, they have been genocided out of existence, we wouldn’t find the actual people, anyway, but just historical records of their existence. We contacted the other species we know, and none of them are familiar with the bodies we now inhabit. What’s worse, the other planets in our civilization have reported the same thing as us, awakening in bodies across an entire spectrum of ages, but in other species, also ones we are unfamiliar with. You were not stupid enough to put one of our species into the body of another. But we let every other civilization we had contact with know that you are involved in something nefarious, even if we do not have the evidence to prove exactly what.

At first we ignored this, seeking more information to confirm our hypothesis that you provided us not new bodies but stolen ones. In addition to sending out queries to all the species we knew, we learned to use the bodies we received.

The new bodies took time to adapt to, but we adapted. The always-on sexual attraction, requiring that the bodies be clothed at most times, was perhaps the most surprising aspect, but at times that was also an advantage. We found other advantages to the new bodies, too. They are more flexible, and their five-fingered hands are more dexterous. In time, we learned to perform physical feats we could never have dreamed of with our old bodies.

But these changes, the good and the bad, were all things we expected. We knew we were going to wake up in a different species. But we expected to wake up in bodies of that species newly created expressly for us. We got confirmation that some other species across the galaxy was living in our old bodies, and we found other planets whose occupants had also had their bodies stolen and replaced with some other world’s stolen bodies. Our civilization and the others we have banded together with have also found information suggesting that some of the species whose bodies we now live in were completely wiped off their planets.

This has left us only one option. You have committed genocide against several species, perhaps dozens of species. There is no option but to deliver retribution in kind. Prepare to be eliminated!

It appeared that, at least at the time they wrote the report, they had not discovered the facilities in some number of years with the new bodies. We think it takes a significant amount of effort to remove the facilities, much more so than it takes to install them, so it is likely that they did not remove them, but they were concealed better than they were on Earth. That said, they were fairly well concealed on Earth, and we think it was only because of the materials of construction of some of the dolls that we stumbled onto them at all.

The insectoids were able to confirm for us the usual method of operation of the body thefts perpetrated by the mind movers. Yes, they held whole planets worth of bodies in suspended animation until they found places to send them, and yes, they made whole civilizations think they were dying of incurable diseases in order to take planets from them, along with their bodies, substituted with those from other civilizations. They came and took bodies like ours when none of the ones they were holding were suitable for the planet one of their victim species occupied.

On the worlds whose occupants were tricked into these schemes, they left the facilities in mode 0 afterward. That was the super-stealthy mode that had allowed them to watch us from right here on Earth for years as they developed their takeover plans, and that would likely make them undetectable for their living occupants. They couldn’t do that at the end here, because switching to mode 0 isn’t supported when there are inhabited artificial bodies. They couldn’t use mode 1 or mode 2, because they needed the human bodies to be active until just before they launched the ships. So they left them in mode 3 on Earth, and presumably on the other worlds where they simply stole the bodies.

To expedite the body-swaps during their takeover, they took advantage of the feature within the facilities that moved a mind to the nearest available suitable body when they swapped another mind into the body. The people of most worlds apparently did not build dolls that were suitable bodies, and so they would be swapped into vacant artificial bodies on their ships and into statues and a few other things. They realized some people might be left behind in statues and the few such kinds of bodies people ordinarily made, but they assumed those few would not find the facilities and there would be too few of them to band together as we had done. They expected we would almost all end up in the bodies their people arrived in. They dumped those bodies into the sun on their way out, so they would be destroyed, and, they thought, our minds with them.

It took centuries, but eventually we received this message:

The ships are on their way with the metals and should arrive in a few of your years. We hope you are ready.

The war that our former allies were involved in is now over. Handfuls of the opposing species still live, without space travel capabilities, and may or may not survive in the places they now live. Our former allies have been reduced to about half of one planet’s population, and they are using their remaining ships to collect their people and relocate them to two relatively undamaged worlds.

Eleven other outpost worlds like ours still exist, with populations not of the mind-movers’ native species. These populations are greatly reduced but not nearly to the degree of the mind-movers, who once had more than fifty full worlds. The outpost worlds have all declared independence, as we did, and they remain our allies and trading partners.

The mind-movers have agreed to return surviving conscripts from our species and those of our allies, and we have each sent a ship to collect them. One ship each, because the numbers of survivors are that low.

We were introduced as a new member of this alliance, and we got to know the other species, which were of widely varying types.

Not long after this, the insectoids arrived with the metals. We tracked them from the facilities as we did with the colony ships before. When they were mere days away, there was a massive “opening” event in which we freed all the captive dolls from their mint package prisons so they could be taken away on the ships the metals arrived in. We instead stored them in plastic and cardboard containers that we could easily load onto the ships.

Dozens of us had trained to fly the ships that had occupied the parks of much of the Americas since the colonization attempt. Those people did so, loading up the insectoid-occupied dolls from their zone, then flying to other zones to pick up those dolls. Once they collected them all, they went into space, where they swapped the dolls for a similar mass of metals. Each ship dropped off its metals at one of several places on Earth where we had set up facilities to use them. In the end, we landed those ships around the world, so that they were not solely located in the Americas.

The insectoids flew their ships off to whatever planet was set up for the dolls to live out their lives in the way that we were doing, and that was the end of that. There was no other galactic trade that made sense for us to carry out over such lengths of space and time. But we continued being friends, now with several other species as well. We continued sending communications, and so we continued our eternal lives.