Blindsight

The stars fell two months ago...

Twenty-five thousand extraterrestrial objects have been burning to ash by the atmosphere two months after they clutched around Earth like a glowing fist and screamed to the skies. It had been two months since that fleeting, dazzling moment of unidentified agents' monitoring.

There is stillness for two months as everyone holds their breath.

Now, a half-abandoned space probe, twitching beyond Neptune's orbit, detects a tiny signal coming from the solar system's boundary, illuminating the universe like a lighthouse beam. There is nothing out there that is speaking to us. Maybe it's speaking to a far-off star. Or maybe somewhere closer, somewhere along the way.

Who then would you send to compel introductions on an intelligence whose motivations are unclear, if not unknown? When the extraterrestrial refuses to meet, who do you send to greet them?

You send a linguist who has had her brain surgically divided into distinct, sentient processing centers, giving her numerous personas. You send a scientist who's been so drastically weakened by grafts and splices that he can no longer feel his own flesh and sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. Sending a pacifist warrior doesn't guarantee she won't be required, nor does it guarantee she'll be of any use if it is. With the use of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths, you summon an extinct hominid predator known as a vampire from the afterlife to command them all. And you dispatch a synthesist, a half-dead informational topologist, to act as a conduit between here and there and as a means by which the Dead Center may perhaps comprehend the Bleeding Edge.

Sending them all to the brink of interstellar space, you hope that you can put your faith in such oddballs and outcasts to decide a planet's destiny. You worry that they could be even more alien than the object they are supposed to locate.

If only you knew what was in store for them, however, you would give everything for it to be true.