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terrestrial-size planets—in orbit around distant stars. But that mission had been largely fulfilled by 2278 with the discovery of a little over a hundred terrestrial planets within a seventy-light-year radius of Earth; less than ten were considered to be habitable, and none was closer than Coyote, forty-six light-years from Earth. Furthermore, none of these worlds displayed any signs of intelligent life.
    Yet even as the public had embraced the anthropic principle—the idea that natural selection favored the emergence of humankind as the heir of the galaxy, to the point that it seemed like divine will—Ramirez dissented by reintroducing an old theory. Although a highly advanced alien race might try to transmit radio messages, as generations of scientists had assumed they would, it was also possible that they might instead resort to visual means of announcing their existence.
    To this end, he proposed that Raziel be retasked from searching for terrestrial planets to a search for intelligent life. It was Ramirez’s theory that, given sufficiently advanced technology, aliens might build very large, rotating structures—triangles, for instance, or even louvered rectangles—that couldn’t be mistaken for planets, which in turn would be established in heliocentric orbits around their native stars. When these structures passed in transit across the faces of those stars, the resultant light curve could be recognized even across the distance of many light-years by high-power telescopes.
    Raziel’s new mission was to visually search those cataloged stars within seventy l.y.’s of Earth believed to have habitable zones, to see if such macrocosmic structures might exist. The array was reprogrammed to disregard already-identified planets that might briefly occultate those same stars; it would take two or more transits for Raziel’s AI to log a newfound object as a possible target. From there it would proceed to the next step, which entailed instructing the nearby deep-space network to transmit a recognition signal—a digitalized series of prime numbers—toward the suspect.
    For nearly ten years, Raziel had conducted its lonely vigil, its telescopes moving from one star system to the next, observing it for a while before moving on. Yet none of these systems showed signs of being inhabited, and although there had been the occasional tiny object that, if only for one-thousandth of a second, occultated a distant sun in a way that suggested it might be artificial in nature, there was no repetition of their light-curve patterns.
    After each sweep, Raziel was programmed to reposition its telescopes toward Proxima Centauri, a routine procedure that allowed the telescopes to recalibrate themselves. Ramirez compared it to a reader relieving eyestrain by focusing upon a random object across the room. Although only 4.2 light-years from Earth, Proxima Centauri was a red dwarf that had long since been determined not to support any terrestrial planets.
    And that was when, against all odds, Raziel produced its first positive contact.
    â€œAt first, Raziel thought it might only be an undiscovered Kuiper Belt object that just happened to cross its focal plane,” Ramirez said. “But when it locked on the target and began tracking it, a different sort of light-curve signature was produced.”
    He reached forward to tap a command into his screen. Above the floral arrangement, a holographic image appeared: a tiny black dot silhouetted against the ruddy orb of Proxima Centauri. “When our people saw this initial image, they believed at first that the system had made a mistake. When they magnified it further, though…”
    Ramirez entered another command; the holo expanded, and the dot became a small, featureless sphere. At that magnification, they could see a small speck hovering close to the object. “That’s what drew Raziel’s attention,” he went on, pointing to the