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”.
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.
Soon it got dark outside, and the group kept going. One thing I noticed was that nobody got hungry or thirsty, and as it got quite late, not tired either. Apparently, freed from our human bodies, we did not have those issues anymore. I wrote that observation on another paper, and I found the ones with the nearest-object and solid-or-articulated questions and added “Unanimous” at the bottom of each one.
They kept playing various games all through the night, and when it was possible I joined in. After the sun rose again, I kept watch on the clock and when it was five minutes to 10, called quits on the games. We gathered the papers with the suggestions and brought them with us as we filed outside.
In the park, each group sat slightly separated from the others and one representative from each group brought the papers up to the talkers. They went through them all and in about 15 minutes came back to speak.
A bunch of you had the same ideas, so I am going to eliminate duplicates here. First, I am going to read the comments about us or the body-snatchers.
Each of us was transferred into the human-like inanimate object closest to us that did not get inhabited by another person. Agreed? (Everybody raised hands.) Anybody think that’s wrong? (No hands.)
We are all stronger than we ought to be, and either more solid, in the case of stuffed toys, or more articulated, in the case of solid toys like action figures and Barbie dolls. Any disagreements with that? (There were none.)
We no longer eat, drink, breathe, go to the bathroom, sleep, have sexual urges, etc. Disagreements? (None.)
The things using our bodies ate a hearty meal before they left, used the bathroom, did not change clothes (or put any on - they walked outside naked if they’d slept that way), and did not close doors behind them. Well, if they did close the door to the house, maybe the residents couldn’t open it if they were too small. So I’m going to withhold judgment on that one. We have a suggestion related to that later. But I did notice we occupied every house facing the park and none had closed front doors.
Everybody in our neighborhood went to this one ship. And there was one intrepid member among us who actually got on board the ship before being thrown out. Michael writes about a blue-skinned alien entering the ship, scanning each person, and tagging them as if with their identity. He or she was detected as an interloper by this process and was dumped off the ship by fellow passengers.
We lost a day. We all went to sleep on the night of the 28th, but woke on June 30th and now it is July 1st. So whatever happened, we think it took some time to activate.
Overall, it seemed like stuff my group noticed, but some people got some details recorded that we didn’t.
Next, I am going to read you some suggested courses of action.
We should search the neighborhood for any people whose bodies did not get taken, dead or alive, and for any of our new bodies which may be stuck and unable to join us.
We should go online and try to connect with other groups.
We should search the park for anything the body-snatchers may have left behind.
We should try to ensure everybody has a way to communicate with others at all times. Who had good communication methods?
Several groups had done essentially what we did with the alphabet pads, and they had us go retrieve those. Other groups had communicated using semaphore code, or with Morse code using high and low arm signals to indicate dots and dashes, and other systems. These did not require external tools but made you have to learn the codes.
After a bit more discussion, we started the home-by-home search by having everybody who lived on the first two streets assemble in front of their houses, while the talkers and some scribes and other helpers went down each of those three lines of houses (one line facing the park and both sides of the next street), interviewing the people at each one. Some of these houses had already been used for the first night’s activities, but this ensured they got answers from their residents.
At each house, we made sure to account for all the people present on the night of the 28th or who should have arrived there that night, even if they did not always live there. If nobody was at a house, they quizzed the neighbors. Some houses were just vacant, but in two cases we broke into a house to find the occupants’ human bodies inside, dead. More often, at about one in five houses, the door was open, and we found lost family members in dolls inside, either scared and hiding, or stuck in something they could not get out of. In a number of cases we had to deal with the pets. Many of them, with the door open, nobody home, and unfed, had already wandered off in search of food, but a few were still hanging around. We ended up with counts of known residents, the dead, and missing people. Only a few people were missing among three lines of houses each four blocks long.
When we were done with this, we all went back to the park. The people from other streets not acting as scribes or other helpers had explored the park itself, and had discovered an underground facility within it. The access was through an unlocked metal door with a holographic projector around it, so even from a foot away it just looked like more grass there. You literally had to step right on it to find it. And it wasn’t very big. Two rooms the size of small bedrooms. They had initially not been able to open the door to the second room because all the larger and stronger people had been out searching houses, but when those people started returning, they got the door open and found there was only one more room the size of the first. There were a number of interesting devices and documents here, but for now we needed everybody out and in the park.
Jennifer, the first talker to address the group, started once everybody was assembled.
If it seems like there are more of us here, that’s because it’s true. We found about 50 more people in similar situations to the rest of us stuck in boxes, behind doors they could not open, and other similar places, including a fifth talker.
She pointed to the troll doll beside her.
I’m Kenny, and I was stuck inside a mint, unopened package of, well, this. I was a collector, and I had quite a few of these things which are now probably all meaningless, though we checked the whole house carefully to make sure nobody from outside had gotten stuck in any of my other collectibles.
Back to you, Jennifer.
She continued her speech.
In addition to this, we found two dead human bodies. We don’t know how long they were dead, but we assume they died before their minds got transferred out, because we did not find dolls for those houses. There are also four people we have not been able to account for. We suspect they did get transferred into dolls, who either wandered off into other neighborhoods, got stuck somewhere, got destroyed by somebody’s pet or the possessed bodies, did not heed the call to go to stand in front of their house, or possibly stowed away on the spaceship. Scribes!
The scribes came forward withe the rosters.
If any of these people are here please come forward. Elena Peterson of 1234 Maple Street, Mike Kanarsky of 1310 Maple Street, Lisa Botter of 1125 Elm Street, and Carrie Kinsky of 1322 Elm Street.
One doll stepped forward and used a set of alphabet pads to identify herself for the group in front.
OK, that’s Lisa. Anybody else from that list?
Jennifer read the remaining three names again and nobody else came forward, so she continued.
The people who stayed here in the park uncovered a craftily hidden underground facility. We are going to leave a couple of the larger dolls here to help explore it, so we’re just going to do both sides of Palm Street next. Everybody who lives on Palm Street, go by the shortest route possible to stand in front of your house. We’re going to go down to 1101 and 1102 and head up the street once it looks like the people nearest us have arrived.
Since I lived on Palm Street, I did not get to stay and explore the facility, but since I was helping to rescue people, I was asked not to stand in front of my house and instead go to 1102 with the crew searching the even side of the street, and simply identify myself when the group reached my house.
We found two more dead people and rescued a few dozen more trapped dolls. And we found the remains of a doll which an animal had destroyed; we figured this was going to be one of our missing people, which we added three more to from Palm Street.
When they went out to search the next street, I got a turn to explore the facility.
The first room was not much to look at. There was a control panel labeled in a language I had never seen, with a note taped to it in English: NOBODY is to fiddle with any of these controls! - Jennifer
There were also several boxes of mysterious supplies, but each box was dozens of the same thing and they’d opened one of everything for people to inspect.
The second room was full of documents in the same mysterious language. This was where people were at work. They’d gotten two smartphones and styluses. The styluses were necessary since we didn’t have the skin to activate the touch screens. Those who were tall enough to reach all the documents and with good enough hands to grasp them and the phones were removing the documents, one at a time, and photographing their covers, as a way of cataloging what we had. They’d also put a label with a number on the end of each shelf of each bookcase to identify it. And they were carefully putting all the books back in the order they came out.
However, I wasn’t good enough with hands to help with this, so after getting a chance to look in here, I left the small room and the facility as a whole. Others were still searching the field and they had found various bits of garbage and lost items but nothing else that looked like a clue.
By the time the next crew came back, we were convinced there was nothing else to find in the park. Jennifer called for us all to assemble again, this time based on what street we lived on. The next street in line filed right out. The following two streets they thought they could cover before it got dark, and they were also to stay for that. There was a street that ran along one end of the park and the ends of the other streets, and two more streets beyond the ones they were going to cover today which the group had walked down yesterday, which were slated for checking tomorrow. My part of this was that I helped rescue people.
Just before dark we reconvened and Jennifer gave us updated numbers. We also shared more ideas.
The opposite site of the park featured an apartment complex, and even though a solid fence separated it from the park, we had a few dolls from there. But we had not paraded past them all, so it was likely there were a lot more still inside their apartments. The rest of the area near the park contained a mall and various other stores. Of course people did not live in those places, but it was possible some people could have gotten transported there. Somebody commented that homeless people often sleep near the mall. Depending on where they slept, the closest thing to them could have been a toy in a toy store, or a mannequin in a clothing store. If there were mannequins living in the mall, we wanted to try to enlist their help. We were short in full-sized, agile people, which they were likely to be. So the people whose streets had already been searched and those who were not being searched today, save for the group in the facility, were going to try to rouse people out of apartments and see what we could find in the mall.
On July 2nd, I ended up as part of the group going to search the mall. The search party had several large dolls, some small dolls, and all those people who had worked in the mall and could tell us what to expect. The outer doors were open when we got there; they ran on a timer. One door at each exit had a sensor and was always open if you were inside. The rest were completely locked both ways from 10 PM to 6 AM. The individual stores inside would mostly be locked shut, some with solid glass or metal doors, others with open grates that small dolls could slip through, and for this reason we had a number of G.I. Joe-sized action figures and Barbie-sized dolls with us. Those security grates had a latch inside which allowed them to open without the key, so anywhere we were able to get somebody inside, we’d eventually be able to open the doors fully and have complete access to the store.
At first we saw nothing. There were two unlocked clothing stores, though, which suggested some people’s minds had gone into mannequins in those stores and they had figured out how to get themselves out. As we got to the far end of the mall, we saw the arcade was open, and we found all our mannequins there. Seven of them, all female and fully dressed, were playing various video games. There were also a few large stuffed animals there, which explained how they got in there in the first place.
We had one talker with us, Fred, and she (Fred had agreed with being called “she” due to her current body) explained that there were a bunch more of us whose minds had been transported into dolls, and we were trying to gather everybody. The various game-players shrugged, stepped away from their games, and gave a “lead the way” gesture. Fred added, “Actually, before we go back, it might help us to have extra hands to search the remaining stores. You all made it out of your stores, but we want to make sure people didn’t get stuck in, say, sealed toy packages. Were there more people who slept near the mall?”
At first, their responses made clear they were laughing at the idea of their friends being stuck this way, but then they started thinking, and counting on their fingers, and eventually they agreed, all the mannequins holding up six fingers to show the rest of us.
Fred led us to one of the mall maps. “We see that you came in through this store, and this store, and some of you at the arcade here. Where did the others sleep?”
They thought for a bit, and finally two of them pointed to two different places at the edge of the mall. One of them was indeed right outside a toy store. The other was near Build-a-Bear Workshop. We went to the toy store first, since it was closer, and some action figures slipped through the bars and got the grate open. We went inside, to the back wall closest to the outside of the mall, and started checking the packages at the back of each of the racks. We found four of them there, rescued them from their packages, and headed over to Build-a-Bear. But it was locked with a solid door. One of our group was the manager of another store. He requested the alphabet pad, and spelled out “I know the manager of this store. He lives on a street now being counted. We can get the keys from him later.”
So we returned to the park and reported our results. When everybody was back from the various searches that were going on, Jennifer made the final announcements for the day:
I wasn’t part of the tech effort, so I joined a group of random small dolls in one of the houses, and to the extent I could, joined in a set of games this group came up with.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.