As global politics fracture over who controls the discovery, as private capital moves to weaponize what Kern built, and as the first artificial superintelligences emerge with wildly different ideas about what first contact means for survival, Kern has to reckon with a question the transmission makes impossible to avoid: What happens when you learn the universe has been watching, and your breakthrough is the reason it just woke up? The Reach: 2067 is a near-future thriller with a hard science fiction backbone, grounded in real physics and driven by scientists who feel the full weight of what they've found. In the tradition of Andy Weir, Ted Chiang, and Arthur C. Clarke, a first contact story told from the inside, by the person who accidentally made the call. Book one of The Reach series.