There had been many escapes from TFX penitentiary. The facility's appeal to the state was that it rendered its convicts down into forms that could inflict minimal harm both to the public and the public purse, costing a handful of dollars to seal the convicts in an oversized toy box compared to the thousands required to house a living, breathing human. Its finances mattered more than its impregnability.

The main method of containment was psychological. Yes, an enterprising inmate might find some crack or crevice in the concrete to squirm through. But TFX held the ultimate ransom - their original body or extracted genetic material in cold storage, or their autocloset template on file. If a criminal escaped, these could be destroyed or deleted as punishment and warning to others.

And the convict would be on the outside, still in whatever inanimate or inhuman form they'd been forced into, exposed to laws of nature that were far less forgiving than the laws of humans. They would be at the bottom of the food chain, somewhere beneath crows that collect interesting trinkets and children that pull the wings off flies. It was safer inside.

The escape attempt itself was rarely dignified. The penitentiary was coy about how many dollified convicts had flushed themselves down the staff toilets, expecting a log flume to freedom, only to become lodged against a grate in a sewerage pipe deep underground, trapped in the squelchy darkness. It was not the sort of thing guards liked to think about, certainly not after their morning coffee.

Even still, the inmates never stopped trying. George was one such escapee. "I'm getting out of here, I'm telling you," he told his cellmates, his doll fists gripping the broad steel bars of their cage. Security was so lax that a doll could slip through easily. The challenge then would be the slog across the hall vast hall to a sealed door the size of a skyscraper. "I've got a girl waiting for me on the outside. My beautiful Polly. She's perfect. Sharp as a knife. And thicker than a-"

"-'thicker than a bowl of TFX gruel', we know! Change the fucking record, would you?" his cellmate barked. "You haven't shut up about her arse since you got here! Bloody hell, I'd screw my own head off if it'd save me listening to you another time. It's funny though. We've never actually seen this girl even after all the time you've been here. Face it - assuming she even exists at all, she's moved on to another man. Probably one taller than five inches," he snorted.

"Not my Polly," George muttered. "She'd wait for me."

That night, they were startled from their bunks by a human hand reaching through the bars of their cage. George looked up and up at the figure in a guard uniform beyond the bars. "Polly! I knew you'd never leave me. What are you doing wearing that uniform?"

She crouched beside the cage. "I work here, silly! How else was I gonna break you out? Look, I'm sorry it took so long. I had to apply to be transferred to your wing."

She twisted away from. The women-starved inmates gasped as her plump cheeks squished against the bars. "Okay, hop in."

George gulped. "'Ho-hop'? Hop in where?"

"Where do you think? They search our belongings when we clock off our shift. This is the only way I can smuggle you out."

"Oh... Oh, no, no... Not like that. Couldn't you just... eat me instead?"

"Babe, stop dawdling. The other guard could come back any second."

George swallowed his pride and heaved himself up on a handful of pleated skirt. A plastic hand caught his elbow. He turned to see the other inmates out of their bunks.

"You wouldn't leave your old cell mates behind, would you?" one pleaded.

It remains to this day the single largest breakout in TFX history.