Dana Scully stared around the dim room. It was some sort of large storage closet, apparently for a number of mannequins. Reaching for the light, she froze as eyes snapped open all around her. What she saw as her eyes adjusted brought a scream to her lips, but only a soundless wheeze escaped.
William. Each and every one of the mannequins was William. Every possible age from old to young, with different body types, different hair styles. But each was clearly and undeniably William. They were all around her, the eyes focused on her. They didn't even look like dolls anymore. There was lively animation to them. They were the most realistic robots Scully had ever seen. But though realistic, they were still imperfect. It was the way a person might seem if they were resurrected from the dead, perhaps. To someone like Dana Scully, someone with a religious background, the difference might be defined as the absence of a soul.
Dana stared around her, stared at the dolls. There were at least 30 of them, maybe even 50. The eyes were strange. They glowed with a sort of backlight, the way a watch or a cell phone screen glows. It bathed each face in an eerie bluish-white luminance, spotlighting each of the William's. A terrible thought occurred to her. Her son, her real son, could be in here, hidden amongst these replicas. If he was drugged, or brain washed, he could be acting just like the rest of them. How would she ever be able to tell?
Staring around her, staring at all of the dolls, she tried to find one that could be him. There were a dozen or more that were the right age and with hair like his. Barely grasping sanity now, faced with so many inorganic clones of her son, strains of a familiar song swam through her mind. And around her the dolls sprang to life.
Not all at once, bust close together, each and every one of them began to sing. Sweet childish voices of various ages floated through the room, bouncing off bare walls. Though the voices were human, there was an eerie lack of emotion to them. Though they did not sing flatly, there was no depth. "Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine…" And Dana Scully was finally able to scream, surrounded by those singing copies of her son who had pulled the song right out of her mind.