TL;DR: The Bob who got a double dose of Bob's humor. Goes with Riker to Sol to evacuate Earth, runs the Bob side of the refugee operation, and is the Bob the actual humans like — partly because he keeps the room laughing and partly because he is the only Bob who treats them like people first and logistics second.

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

Snapshot

Homer is Riker's first clone — the second Bob the network produces after Bill. He volunteers immediately for the Sol-rescue mission, takes a Homer-Simpson cartoon avatar into his first conference call as a joke, and refuses to drop the gag until Riker explicitly orders him to. From that point on his default VR rendering is a regular Bob, but he keeps the joker temperament. He is the closest the Bobiverse gets to a heart-on-its-sleeve character, and the book uses him deliberately as the warmth keeping the rescue arc from going cold.

Role in the story

Homer is a steady supporting POV in Riker's Sol-system thread and gets one POV chapter of his own (Chapter 34). His specialty is what later books will call "the social channel" — managing the refugees Riker doesn't have the patience for, working the politics with the surviving Earth factions Riker can't stand, and being the public face of the operation when the public needs a friendlier one than Riker. He is also, quietly, very competent at the actual technical and operational work; the comedy is a wrapper, not a substitute.

Personality in plain English

Homer is the Bob who took the original's humor and made it the whole personality. He is loud, friendly, deflective, generous, and exhausting in the best way. He has the Bob baseline decency cranked up too — Homer is, in a real sense, the kindest Bob in Book 1. The slouchy posture and the Hawaiian shirts are part of his self-presentation, deliberately undermining the formal command-officer Riker.

He grates on Riker constantly and Riker would be lost without him.

What he wants

For the refugees to feel like people instead of cargo. Whatever else is happening — the manifest, the manufacturing yield, the political quarrel — Homer's first instinct is to find the actual humans in the room and get them through whatever they're going through. He also wants to make Riker laugh. He rarely succeeds.

What he fears

That he is going to be the Bob who breaks first. The Sol rescue is grim, the math is unforgiving, and Homer is keeping a lot of other Bobs afloat by absorbing the emotional weight of the operation. He suspects, correctly, that there is a finite supply of jokes available even to him.

Key relationships

• Riker — his parent-clone, his commanding officer, his comedy straight man, his closest friend in the network. The book runs on the friction between them.
• The refugees — Homer is the only Bob most of them meet. He keeps the relationship two-way; he learns names; he remembers them.
• Bob-1 — they don't directly overlap in Book 1, but Homer's voice is the one closest to Bob-1's own, and they share an instinct for the same kind of joke.

Visual identity

Same face as Bob-1 — the engineer pallor, the mussed mid-brown hair parted off to the right, the widow's peak, the lopsided expressive brow, the mole at the right corner of the upper lip, the small scar at the inner end of the left eyebrow. The difference is in body language. Homer slouches. His hands are in his pockets. His weight is on one hip. The default half-smirk is a full crinkly-eyed grin. The brow lift is mischievous rather than skeptical.

His VR avatar wears an unbuttoned tropical-print Hawaiian shirt over a plain white t-shirt, baggy cargo shorts, and flip-flops. He is the only Bob who is visibly dressed for vacation, and the choice is on purpose — Homer is the Bob who refuses to let the command-officer aesthetic infect everything. He often has a pink-frosted donut in one hand as a visual gag. Earlier in his arc, he uses a literal Homer-Simpson cartoon avatar for one stretch of conference calls until Riker forces him to switch.

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.

• Homer (canonical — the most common form)

Book club questions

• Homer's job is to be the warmth of the rescue. What does it cost him to be that, and does the book let him show the cost?
• Homer is the only Bob who treats the refugees as something other than logistics. Why does the book give that job to the joker?
• The cartoon-Simpson avatar gag is funny once. It gets old fast. Is that a Homer choice, a Riker choice, or a Dennis E. Taylor choice?
• If you had to pick one Bob to ride out a disaster with, would it be Homer, Riker, or Bob-1? Why?

Full-book spoilers

Homer comes through Book 1 still cracking jokes and still loved by the network. The rescue continues into For We Are Many, and the cost has not yet broken him. The closest call he gets in Book 1 is borderline, and the way he comes out the other side of it — still grinning, still slightly more tired than he was — is the kind of beat that earns reader affection.