The bald man was named Max, the same name as the protagonist of Mad Max. An orphan, he had turned to crime after growing up and spent several years in prison. He was currently on parole.
After spending years behind bars, Max had finally learned his lesson and decided to turn over a new leaf. He found work at an exoskeleton factory, where he worked from morning to night and was allowed only four bathroom breaks a day, each lasting no more than five minutes.
Life was hard, but Max struggled to keep going, determined not to return to his old ways. Yet fate played a cruel joke on him. A day earlier, he had accidentally been locked inside an assembly chamber and exposed to massive amounts of nuclear radiation.
In the Marvel Universe or the DC Universe, Max would probably have become a metahuman. Unfortunately, this was a normal world. The only result of his exposure to so much nuclear radiation was cancer, leaving him just five days to live.
The factory treated Max with utter cruelty. They tossed him a bottle of pills and kicked him out to fend for himself.
To survive, Max approached Spider, the local underworld boss, hoping to be smuggled to an off-world space station—Pleasure Space—for treatment.
Yes, Pleasure Space, the double-ringed station from earlier. This world was rather unusual.
In the future, as resources dwindled and the environment deteriorated, a group of wealthy people had banded together to build a fortress in space: Pleasure Space.
As for Earth and its inhabitants, those people had all but abandoned them, leaving robots to manage them with rigid rules and brutal methods. Human rights were practically nonexistent. If a robot found you guilty, you were guilty.
That was why Max had to work under such terrible