BRIDGING THE VOID

Humanity has spent three years listening to Mars.
Now Mars has asked a question.

The first exchanges were numbers, patterns, corrections, painstaking proof that two civilizations could recognize meaning without understanding one another. Gavin Marks helped build that fragile language one signal at a time. He knows better than anyone how much can be lost between a message and the meaning people want it to have.

But governments are tired of listening from a distance.

A controlled meeting is becom...