54.Party

Riker attends his great-great-great-grandson Justin's seventy-fifth birthday party on Romulus, gathering with dozens of family members across generations. The chapter explores Riker's emotional distance from his human relatives and his internal conflict about the burden of remembering each individual family member's life and death over centuries.

Riker arrives at Justin's birthday celebration, which has drawn approximately fifty family members of various ages to the house. He observes the organized chaos of the gathering and reflects that while small talk was never Original Bob's strength, he now understands the deeper meaning in connecting with relatives who all carry his DNA. In Justin's sitting room, Riker and his great-great-great-grandson exchange affectionate banter, with Justin jokingly calling himself "Admiral space cadet" and Riker reflecting on his memory of first seeing two-year-old Justin on camera. When Riker broaches the topic of replication that he and Justin discussed years ago—the day Julia (Justin's mother) died—Justin expresses his peace with mortality and invokes Pascal's Wager. Justin then directly addresses what Riker has been avoiding: his decreasing appearances over the years. Riker admits that Julia's death affected him profoundly and that he has adopted a coping mechanism of viewing his relatives as a group rather than as individuals, creating emotional distance to manage the accumulating grief of remembering each person's death with perfect clarity. He reveals to Justin that Justin is the last of the clan he has been maintaining close contact with, a practice Bob-1 calls "fading into legend." Justin accepts this gracefully, and Riker eventually excuses himself to allow other family members their turn with the birthday honoree.