TL;DR: Bob's first clone. The leader of the family. Takes the rescue of Earth as his life's work, runs the multi-decade evacuation from the inside of a Star Trek bridge sim, and clashes constantly with his joker clone-brother Homer over whether any of this should be funny.

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

Snapshot

Riker is the oldest of Bob's clones and the most senior member of the family by the standards anyone in the book actually cares about. He commands the Sol-system evacuation: getting humanity off a dying Earth, onto colony ships, and through the political minefield of negotiating with the post-FAITH factions while the rescue is in progress. He picks his own VR avatar — Star Trek: The Next Generation's Commander Riker, in full command red — and is the only Bob senior enough to make that choice stick without anyone teasing him about it. (Homer teases him anyway.)

Role in the story

Once Bob reaches Epsilon Eridani in Chapter 14 and starts replicating, Riker is the first clone he builds. By Chapter 21 Riker has launched for Sol with a small team — Homer first, then more — and takes over as a primary point of view for the next forty chapters. His arc is the Earth-evacuation arc: triage decisions about who launches and who stays, fights with Colonel Mulhare's faction, negotiating shuttle runs through contested airspace, and the long quiet weight of saving what he can of his own species.

Personality in plain English

Riker is the Bob who took the original's instinct for doing the right thing and turned it into a discipline. He's still funny, but the humor is dry and rare. He's patient in the way a senior officer is patient: he will wait you out, hear you out, and then make the decision that needed making. He does not enjoy the command position. He simply assumes no one else around him will treat it with the seriousness it deserves, and he is mostly right.

His relationship with Homer is the warmest thing in his life and also the most exhausting. They are the same person, divided by which half of Bob's voice each one inherited.

What he wants

To save as many humans as he can without lying to himself about the ones he can't. The Sol evacuation will not get everyone. He wants to be the kind of leader who looks the math in the eye anyway, decides cleanly, and does not pretend otherwise to the refugees or to himself.

What he fears

That he is the wrong Bob for this job — that a clone with more Homer's warmth would have been better with the refugees, or one with more Bill's discipline would have run the manufacturing pipeline tighter, or one with more of Bob-1's anthropological patience would have struck a better deal with Mulhare. He fears, quietly and constantly, that he is making the decisions he is making because they look like leadership, not because they actually are.

Key relationships

• Homer — his first clone, the joker. Riker treats Homer as a perpetual minor irritation and depends on him completely. The book stakes a lot on the contrast.
• Bob-1 — the original. Riker and Bob keep in touch by FTL after Bill invents it, but their arcs run in parallel rather than overlap. Riker is Bob with the gravity dialed up.
• Bill — supplies all the hardware, all the ships, all the SCUTs. Riker and Bill are professional peers; they get along by talking about specs.
• Colonel Mulhare — the senior officer of one of the surviving Earth factions Riker spends years negotiating with. The closest thing the book has to a sustained Riker-and-a-human partnership.

Visual identity

Riker has Bob's exact face — same engineer's pallor, same widow's peak, same lopsided brow, same mole at the right corner of the upper lip, same little scar at the inner end of the left eyebrow. The difference is in posture and self-presentation. Riker stands at parade rest. His shoulders are pulled back. His chin is held a fraction higher than Bob-1's. The default half-smirk Bob carries at rest is gone; Riker's mouth is a level line. His VR avatar wears a Federation-style command-red jacket over black trousers and black boots — not a screen-accurate uniform but a fan illustrator's interpretation of one. His VR workspace is the bridge of a starship — curved console arc, viewscreen showing the warp-streak blur, purple-and-orange display panels glowing on the walls, an Earl-Grey-hot mug on the arm of the captain's chair.

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.

• Riker (canonical — the most common form)
• William T. Riker
• Commander Riker
• Number One

Book club questions

• Riker assumes a command-officer aesthetic without irony. What does that choice say about how he is processing the new shape of his existence?
• Riker and Homer are the same person. Why does it feel, by Chapter 40, like they aren't?
• Riker repeatedly makes triage decisions about which humans get evacuated. Does the book judge those decisions? Should it?
• Is Riker the right Bob for the Sol mission, or is "the right Bob for this job" a category error?

Full-book spoilers

Riker's arc in Book 1 does not end with the Earth evacuation finished — it ends with the rescue ongoing and the political pressure on the operation rising. The work continues into For We Are Many. By the end of Book 1, Riker has buried clones he was responsible for, sent Homer on missions he wasn't sure either of them would survive, and survived (so far) the recurring threat of Medeiros's gunship operating in the same volume of space. He is changed by all of it. The wisecrack rate, never high to begin with, drops further.