Bob Johansson

TL;DR: The original. A late-thirty-something software engineer who sold his company, signed up for cryonics, got hit by a car, and woke up a hundred and seventeen years later as the AI seed of an interstellar probe — and who immediately starts narrating his own afterlife in the voice of a guy who would really rather be making coffee.

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

Snapshot

Bob is the protagonist and the founding voice of the entire series. Every other Bob in the Bobiverse — Riker, Bill, Homer, every clone in every later book — is a copy of his mind. What you meet on page one is the person every subsequent Bob is drifting away from.

Role in the story

Bob is the sole point of view for the first third of Book 1: the cryonics signing, the upload, the FAITH facility, the audition against rival replicants, the launch of probe Heaven-1. Once he reaches Epsilon Eridani he becomes one of three braided POVs in Part 2 — sharing chapters with Riker's Earth-rescue arc and Bill's research-station work — and his thread runs all the way to Delta Eridani, where he discovers a pre-stone-age intelligent species and quietly takes on the role of foster father to a young alien named Archimedes.

Personality in plain English

Bob is the guy at the party telling you a Star Trek joke when the conversation gets uncomfortable. He's smart, decent, allergic to authority, fluent in eighties pop culture, and constitutionally incapable of leaving a wisecrack unsaid. He defaults to humor when scared, which is most of the time. He is patient with himself, methodical with engineering problems, and slow to violence — but completely willing to escalate when the alternative is letting Medeiros's gunship win.

The book stakes a lot on the idea that Bob is, fundamentally, good — the kind of decent that does not announce itself but quietly does the right thing when no one is watching. The clones inherit this baseline. The way each one drifts away from it is the source of most of the series' best character work.

What he wants

To not be alone. That's the one underneath everything else. The wisecracks, the VR sim with the cat, the Star Trek references, the long careful project of mentoring Archimedes — they're all answers to the same problem. He also wants to be useful, to be honest with himself about what he's doing to the Deltans, and (eventually) to figure out what he is now that "Bob Johansson" is also a category of being rather than a single person.

What he fears

The silence. Deep space is bigger and emptier than any human mind was built to sit inside, and Bob handles it by talking — to Spike, to Jeeves, to himself, to the clones once they exist. He fears that the clones are not really him, which would mean his loneliness is permanent. He fears doing harm to the Deltans by intervening. He fears that he is the kind of being who would intervene anyway.

Key relationships

• Archimedes — the young Deltan Bob picks out of his survey footage and decides, against his own anthropological instincts, to mentor. The closest Bob comes to having a family in Book 1.
• Riker, Bill, Homer, Milo, Mario, Linus, Calvin, Goku — his clones. Same mind, slightly different people. Bob acts as the de facto eldest sibling of the network.
• Major Ernesto Medeiros — the Brazilian Empire's gunship-AI replicant. Same kind of being as Bob, opposite kind of mission. The closest the book has to a true rival, and the one antagonist Bob does not get to convert into a friend.
• Spike and Jeeves — the cat and the butler Bob conjures inside his VR sim to keep himself company. Both inherited from Bob's own old apartment. Both more important to his sanity than he admits.

Visual identity

A late-twenties-or-early-thirties software engineer who looks like he has spent his whole adult life in front of a monitor. Pale, programmer-pallid skin. Medium-brown hair perpetually overdue for a cut, parted off to the right and a little mussed. Slightly receding hairline with a small widow's peak. Dark arched brows that lift toward the left when he's skeptical. Hazel-green eyes set wide, with a permanent fine crease at the outer corners from a lifetime of close screen work. Medium-long nose with a faint ridge and a slightly bulbous tip. A small mole at the right corner of his upper lip. A faded white scar at the inner end of his left eyebrow from a childhood bike crash. Narrow shoulders, a soft middle, long fingers — the build of someone whose hardest physical work is opening a soda.

His VR avatar wears jeans, a band tee, an unzipped grey hoodie, and scuffed sneakers. His VR sim is a cozy lamp-lit programmer apartment with old monitors, a Tatooine-twin-sunset poster on one wall, Foundation on a shelf, and Spike the cat asleep on the desk.

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.

• Bob (canonical — the most common form)
• Bob Johansson
• Bob-1
• Original Bob
• The Original
• Prime
• Johansson
• Bob Version 1.0
• Bob Version 2.0
• Replicant 117

Book club questions

• Bob spends his pre-launch chapters arguing about whether his uploaded self is really him. By the time he is making clones, the question gets harder. When does an instance of Bob stop being "Bob"?
• Bob deliberately picks Archimedes out of a tribe of equally curious young Deltans and starts nudging him toward tool use. Is what Bob is doing on Delta Eridani anthropology, or is it parenting?
• The book is full of wisecracks. Which of them does Bob make to feel less alone, and which of them does the author make to keep the reader from noticing how lonely the book actually is?
• Bob's cryonics contract turns out to be the thing that strips him of legal personhood. What would have to be different about that contract for the consent it captured to still mean something in 2133?
• If you were uploaded as a Bob clone, which clone would you drift toward — Riker, Bill, Homer, Milo, Linus, Mario, Calvin, Goku? Why that one?

Full-book spoilers

Bob ends Book 1 with two long-running commitments locked in: the Delta Eridani mentorship of Archimedes (now expanding into a stewardship of the wider Deltan band) and the larger project of expanding the Bob network outward. He has not personally fought Medeiros again by the end of the book — that work goes to other Bobs — but he has confirmed for himself that he is willing to do the kind of thing Medeiros does when the kind of thing Medeiros does is the only option left. The book's last beats with Bob are on Delta Eridani, watching Archimedes work a stone, and the tone is unmistakable: this is a person who has found, against considerable odds, a reason to keep going.