Better Futures is a military research company, one of those companies whose name suggests one thing but whose actual purpose is likely to be the total opposite. Charles Neumann is a mechanical engineer at Better Futures, and the novel's eponymous Machine Man. Although knowledgeable and careful, Neumann loses a leg in an accident involving a hydraulic clamp, and being a man who basically thinks in mechanical terms and parameters all of the time, he starts to experiment with prosthetic legs. He soon manages to construct prosthetics that are so advanced and effective that he deliberately amputates his remaining leg so that he can fully experience the benefits of the prosthetic ones he has developed.
Better Futures gets totally behind his new-found developmental division and give him his own research team in cybernetics. Their initial intention is that they can develop the prosthetics for medical use in hospitals and sell them in that way, but they start to develop augmented prosthetics for private customers. Their biggest customer base is the military itself; soon, Neumann is rebuilding wounded soldiers, augmenting their prosthetics and making a superior force out of them.
Neumann, becoming more and more the stereotypical crazy genius, is beginning to suffer strange psychological effects of replacing body parts with prosthetics. After accidentally severing his hand, he starts to replace more and more of his body parts with his mechanized creations. Eventually he has been completely rebuilt from the neck down; he is a mechanical soldier. The metamorphosis is complete when his mind is uploaded and turned into a computer.
