Blindsight aliens

You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Two months of silence, while a world held its breath.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight