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It is Lucien's first time in space and he's nervous. This is not really the best sign considering that the reason he's going to space is to join Starfleet but presumable his nerves will settle and it will be fine. It's only a six-hour trip anyways. His nerves not particularly settled he sits down for the acceleration to warp, which is completely pointless given the inertial dampeners but it makes him feel better.
Despite all his worrying takeoff goes smoothly-
"That's a fair point... On further reflection, I may just be uncomfortable with the idea of having the company share my name even if I was the only founder... it would feel... self-aggrandizing, I think."
"Yeah. I don't expect that the person who did would want their name associated with it."
"The theory is that it interferes with the natural development of a civilization, and for some reason, that this is worse than billions of people dying of preventable diseases."
"Not... really? Supposedly, another species tried it the other way almost a millennium before my time, but I don't actually trust their records of that. Some captains have unilaterally disobeyed orders and intervened in minor ways, but nothing substantial, and the results have been mixed."
"One planet had industrialization so rapid that it led to a famine, and another planet had its major religion collapse, but otherwise things went well on that second one. There were also a couple of instances of starship captains taking over lower-tech planets."
"I think that the particular disaster could have been avoided, but people in the Federation aren't really willing to actually try to figure out how they can do a better job of uplifting planets."
"That seems sad. It'd be just about the most worthwhile thing in the world to do, if they could figure out how."
It turns out that running a biotech start-up aiming to advance the state of medical science by centuries is sort of a lot of work. Lucien thinks that if magic weren't involved this would be enough to take his mind off a crush, at least sometimes. It doesn't make him less effective at his job - he's looked up mortality rates and knows full well what Annie's life expectancy would be normally. He thinks a lot about immune system boosters and organ replication and cryogenics and possible paths to immortality and how speed limits should be lower. Probably Silvercell is doing well, but he can't bring himself to care about revenue or valuations, beyond instrumentally. He calls Annie whenever he learns something confidential, which is often given how intellectual property law apparently works on her planet. He also asks for her advice, on what paths to pursue, how to pitch his medical advances so people use them, if there's anything he can do for her at all.
She will give her (uninformed) opinion on what direction to take the business if he wants it. She doesn't need anything, she's doing fine.
That's good to hear. He doesn't press her for details about her life, but he listens very intently to anything she does share.
Mostly that is going to take the form of explanations for why she might not have been able to come to the phone immediately. Traffic. Lab section ran late. Sleeping in because she was up late with a book.
"Well, I wouldn't want to spoil it - it's a classic about the practice of taking noble children to the capital for education and as tacit hostages back when that was a big thing -"
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