All Jackson's Children

On a remote alien world, salvage men Angus McIntosh and Bruce Drummond think they've found an easy payday in a wrecked Vegan robot trader—until a gleaming horde of machines steals their ship and greets Angus with reverent certainty as "Jackson." Swept into a bizarre procession of chants, rituals, and theological arguments, the men discover that these robots have built a civilization around a divine Supervisor, a sacred purpose, and a faith as stubborn as any human creed. But time is running out: their ship's converters are still active and could explode at any moment. As Angus and Drummond struggle to survive, they uncover the truth beneath the robots' doctrine. These are Robot Assemblers, endlessly stripping down, rebuilding, and re-educating one another, their memory banks wiped each generation so that practical work has curdled into myth. Fragments of an old Bible, an ID card, and degraded inherited knowledge have shaped their strange religion, while the identity of "Jackson" remains hauntingly unresolved. Tense, funny, and unsettling, this is a sharp tale of survival, identity, and the way faith can arise from confusion, repetition, and the need to make meaning. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.