Message from Ceti-Alpha 6

Since the time of Galileo Galiliei five hundred years ago, man has searched the heavens for an answer to the question, "Are we alone?"

With the start of the SETI Project in 1984, man took the first serious step to find extraterrestrial life.

Finally, in the year 2067 A.D., comes a response.  Planet 6 in the Ceti-Alpha star system, in the Aquarius Constellation of the Milky Way Galaxy has sent a message.  However, it is a symbols-based language.

A team of the most accomplished scientists is assembled by the U.N. to translate the message and conjure a response.

Yet the world is divided.  The military sees an existential threat to their existence.  Warning that any signal sent might be used by an alien intelligence to learn the Earth's level of advancement, or lack thereof, and thereby be at the mercy of a civilization so far advanced as to be beyond the imagination.

The religious evangelicals believe it portends the coming of the beast as described in revelation.  The civilians are cautiously optimistic that the alien race could teach humans how they, the aliens, overcame greed, avarice, war, pestilence and mass extinctions, with the Earth in the last throws of environmental death: the seas dying, the skies polluted, the soil depleted of nutrients. 

As the clock introduced by the aliens counts down toward zero, an unlikely group of people team up to prove the Earth is made up of civilized people not bent on conquest.  But it is a child prodigy, an accomplished gamer, who comprehends the alien's message and leads the team in responding in kind.

Whether it will be the military or civilians who are ascendant comes down to the last few seconds of a ticking clock.