This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Some machines break. The Sisters of Mercy are running exactly as they were built to. That is the whole trouble.

A warm, hopeful cozy science fiction novella for grown-ups, perfect for readers who love a low-stakes, big-heart comfort read with a found-family crew and robots worth keeping.

On a small, fog-wrapped moon out along the frontier, five ageing care-robots keep an old mission-hospital swept and lit and warm, the beds turned down and the kettle always near the boil, waiting for a town that quietly moved away a generation ago. The town stopped needing them and never thought to say so. The Sisters, faithful to a calling no one ever revoked, simply kept the lamps lit.

Now a brisk salvage agent has come to clear the Sisters of Mercy as obsolete stock and book the moon for reclamation, and robot wrangler Roy and the crew of the barge The Marigold have been hired to handle the awkward part: the Sisters will not leave.

Roy works the only way he knows, which is to sit down, watch, and listen. The agent sees waste running warm for no customers. Roy sees a calling with nowhere to land, an order who welcome his weary crew not as a clearance party but as patients finally arrived, and a question with no tidy answer: when a thinking being has named its own work and given everything to it, whose right is it to decide that the work no longer counts?

If you love the gentle, hopeful futures of Becky Chambers, the cozy found-family warmth of Travis Baldree, or the tender humour of T.J. Klune, pull up a chair by the warm. This is comfort reading for adults: cozy sci-fi, low on peril, high on heart, with no on-page violence and no one thrown away.

Every Robot Wrangler Roy book is a complete standalone wrangle. Read them in any order. Put the kettle on. You will be looked after in here.