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.