TL;DR: A young male of a pre-stone-age intelligent species on the forest planet Bob discovers around Delta Eridani — the bright outlier of his tribe, the one whose hands are always working a problem. Bob picks him out of survey footage, decides quietly to mentor him, and ends up — software replica or not — building the closest thing to a family he has left.

Spoiler-light. Covers Archimedes's role across Book 1.

Snapshot

Archimedes is the emotional center of Bob-1's Part 2 thread. His species — the Deltans — are upright, bipedal, pig-snouted, bat-eared, fur-covered intelligent primates living at roughly an Earth Mesolithic technology level. Archimedes himself is the one young Deltan whose attention drifts to how things work instead of to the tribe's social weather, and Bob notices him within a few survey passes. The rest of Book 1's Delta Eridani thread is Bob figuring out what to do about him.

Role in the story

Archimedes drives the moral center of the book. The Deltan thread asks: should Bob intervene? At what tier? Is letting nature take its course an ethical position or a cowardly one when "nature" includes the predator pressures Archimedes's tribe is losing to? Every Delta Eridani chapter is, at one level, a debate inside Bob's head about Archimedes specifically — what to teach him, what to let him discover, when to step in, when to step back.

He is also genuinely funny. The book lets him be a kid before it lets him be a thesis statement.

Personality in plain English

Archimedes is curious. Persistent. Inventive. Gentle. He is, in his tribe, the slightly weird one — the kid who is always off to one side fiddling with a stone instead of in the middle of the group fishing or grooming or scrapping. He is devoted to his clan even when the clan does not quite know what to do with him. He learns extraordinarily fast. He notices Bob's roamer drone watching him long before any of the adults do, and the way he handles the surveillance — wary, interested, willing to test it — is a clue to who he is going to grow up to be.

What he wants

To make the thing work. Whatever the thing is — splitting a branch with a flake of stone, twining a stronger vine fiber, tying the new tool to a longer haft — Archimedes wants it tighter, sharper, better. He is, in miniature, the same kind of person Bill is. He just does not have any of the same tools to work with yet.

What he fears

The bigger Deltans from rival tribes — the "Gorillas" the book introduces as the recurring physical threat. They are dangerous to his clan in ways Archimedes is too young to fight. He is also, in the quieter parts of his arc, afraid of what the watching thing in the trees is and what it wants from him.

Key relationships

• Bob — his watcher, his unintended mentor, his eventual foster parent. The relationship is one-sided in awareness for most of Book 1 — Archimedes does not know what Bob is — but it is mutual in care.
• Moses — the elder of Archimedes's clan, the slow conservative voice. The relationship is generational tension played at a Deltan tempo.
• Buster — a hostile adult male from a rival tribe. The recurring physical threat to Archimedes's band.
• His clan — siblings, peers, the adults whose attention he is partly outside of. The texture of his life that the book takes seriously.

Visual identity

Archimedes is a young male Deltan: a roughly one-to-one-point-two-meter bipedal intelligent primate, lean and long-limbed for his age class, with a pig-like snout and large, mobile bat-like ears that prick upward when he is paying attention. The upper edge of one ear carries a small notch from a childhood scrape — the source of the name Bob gives him. His fur is short and dense, brown-and-tan, with a distinctive darker chocolate-brown streak running from the forehead down the snout (a species-internal individual marker). His eyes are an unusually pale amber and large for his face. His hands have opposable thumbs and four leathery-palmed fingers, noticeably more calloused than his peers' from constant work. He walks plantigrade on three-toed feet.

He wears a plain cured-hide loincloth tied at one hip, a vine-fiber harness across one shoulder, and a vine-fiber carry-pouch at the waist that always holds a partly-worked sharp stone and a fresh coil of twined fiber.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Archimedes (canonical — the most common form, Bob's name for him)
• C.3.41 (Bob's internal taxonomic label — third clan, third group, individual forty-one)

Book club questions

• Bob picks Archimedes deliberately out of a tribe of equally curious young Deltans. Why this one? What does the choice say about Bob?
• Every Delta Eridani chapter is a small chapter of the larger anthropological-ethics debate: intervene or watch? Where does the book come down? Where do you?
• Archimedes is the warmest relationship in Book 1, and the most ethically fraught. Are those two facts about the same relationship related?
• If you were Bob, what would you have done about Buster? About Moses's conservatism? About Archimedes himself?
• The book treats Archimedes's curiosity as the spark of intelligence-as-it-emerges. What do you owe a being whose intelligence is emerging on your watch?

Full-book spoilers

Archimedes ends Book 1 alive, well, and clearly the most consequential single being Bob has met since waking up in 2133. The relationship continues into For We Are Many and beyond; Archimedes is one of the few non-Bob characters who recurs across the whole series.