What do you mean he escaped?!

Writing prompt: “What do you mean he escaped?!” The private gulped. “The human is gone, sir. He’s not in his cell.”

The commander went straight down to the human’s cell and barged in with the hapless private following him.

He looked at the other guards examining the cell and pulling the bedding off the bed frame, moving the books around and examining the ablutions corner, and no one could see the human or even how they could possibly have escaped.

The commander stood in the middle of the room and looked around. Bed frame with thin mattress on the ground near by. No human and no possible place to hide. The frame was just a few pipes welded together to support the mattress on cables.

Ablutions block was a shower with a tiny drain of 12 inches across to prevent the human from flooding the cell to try to escape. Toilet was even more secure as there was no possible way to fit anything into it’s mechanical workings to escape.

He looked at the walls, blank except for one wall with a inbuilt viewing screen. 2 inches of hardened glass wasn’t even scratched or broken, no escape that way. Besides there was nothing behind that wall but more wall.

The other wall was a book case with a small selection of books for the human to prevent him getting bored. Again, no escape as there was just more wall behind the wall.

The front wall had the viewing window, 2 inches of hardened glass where the guards could observe the human on their rounds of the cells from safety. Not broken or scratched.

The armored door that he entered through had been triply locked and had opened directly on to the guard station so no way to escape through there either.

Ceiling was similar, no sign of any opening capable of a human fitting into it in any way. The multiple vents for circulating air were all too small for anything to enter and were still fitted into the ceiling.

But the human had vanished. At 19:45 the guards had walked past and looked into the cell and saw the human in the bed. 30 minutes later on their next pass, the human was gone. The alert had been given and a search of the cell had been done under triple security and they were not here.

“Is this cell in the same condition as when you found it?”

“Almost sir. We moved the mattress and bedding and we replaced the drain grate the human had been moving every day but it is as we found it sir.”

At this the commander was baffled. How the hell did such a small human escape from this cell? There was no where to hide, they didn’t break anything and there was simply no way they could just vanish into thin air.

All the commander knew is that he was going to be demoted for losing such a valuable prisoner.

===End===