Man's brain has a finite capacity when it comes to large numbers. At a certain point, distance becomes meaningless, something beyond comprehension. How far is ten thousand kilometres? A hundred thousand? A billion? The vastness of space soon becomes incomprehensible, unimaginable. Bleak, empty, and beyond understanding.
In that black, frigid nothingness, in that terrifying absence of anything, a single word travelled from a dim backwater system of an unremarkable galactic arm to Earth, defying the bounds of Newtonian physics, speeding through E-space, breaking and making conventional laws of science as it hurtled towards Sol.
The word travelled on a military band, encoded and scrambled in an unintelligible algorithm, coded so deftly that anyone bar the intended recipient would take twenty lifetimes to understand.
The word was CONTACT.