High Rock

The High Rock is "a massive top-security satellite prison crammed with 10,000 of the hardest most vicious criminals from the world below" (2000 AD prog 288). Well, that's the hype. The reality is that you can be sent there by the military dictatorships who rule the Earth of the future simply for refusing to sell them your family land, like Genghis Eighteen, or for smuggling food to starving civilians, like Harry Twenty. Once on the High Rock, your surname is replaced by the number of years you are serving (e.g. Big Red One is serving one hundred years for a variety of crimes too ghastly to delineate, and Root Sixty-Six isn't a barrel of laughs either). That's why the guards, or 'slugs', refer to you and the other prisoners as 'numbers'. If you lay a finger on a slug, you join the 'heavenly bodies': frozen corpses orbiting the satellite, mouths stretched wide in a final scream of terror or despair, ice-coated skin glinting in the Earth-light. And for lesser offences you could join the punishment detail cleaning the waste vents on the High Rock's surface, only a spacesuit protecting you from the heart-stopping interstellar cold.

Your food is soya-slop and your recreation consists of stints in the prison's gym, workshop or library. Your burning hatred of this celestial Hell and its chilling overseer Warden Worldwise means that as soon as you arrive you start planning how to leave. Your cellmate, Ben Ninety, claims to be the first number to have been imprisoned on the High Rock and his in-depth knowledge will be invaluable to your escape plan — but he may not be all that he seems...

Of course, in the event of your escape plan failing you could always start an insurrection, take over the High Rock and fly it away to somewhere more congenial. You only have fifty years' worth of supplies, but hopefully some friendly passer-by from the Tau Ceti Imperium will see your plight and give you a tow to a tropical planet in need of thousands of hardened criminals with big muscles and short tempers. If not, half a century of soya-slop and situational homosexuality beckons.