Sarah was sipping on her drink idly through a straw when she saw someone approach. She was not terribly good with names—or faces, for that matter—but she was sure he looked familiar. No doubt she had seen him around the ship at some point.<br/><br/>She gave a look of surprise and recognition when he spoke. “Oh, Dr. Hawthorne! I remember you, I was at that talk you gave to the factory team. The one on improving emergency protocols for automated drone shutdown in the event of catastrophic dome breech? You probably don’t remember me though, it was a pretty big auditorium.”<br/><br/>She paused a moment, feeling a sense of relief. At least for the time being, she could forget about socializing like a normal person and just talk about what she knew. “Anyway, I hope you’re not about to give me too much credit on the spatial awareness systems—the part I wrote was really more of a memo than a paper. Dr.  Brunner added a lot more detail to the pseudo-code regarding how the data could be parsed. I was actually pretty embarrassed when he insisted on putting my name first on the paper.<br/><br/>“But it was pretty gratifying when my initial theory was validated in later work. And after that, I got less attitude—before that it was always, ‘you’re just a tech, let the important people do the thinking.’<br/><br/>“All my ranting aside, it’s kind of silly talking about my work when you’re here. I read your first paper on modifying the primary navigation AI to better anticipate micrometeorites when sensor data is unreliable. Well, in all honesty I didn’t understand much more than the abstract, but I was amazed such nuanced decision making was possible given the extreme number of variables involved.”<br/><br/>Sarah forced herself to finally stop and let the poor man respond—when talking about things like this, she often became overexcited.