Author:
Mario Brash is a reader, writer, coffee enthusiast, and huge nerd of many things. 

Jessica Leibniz tried being a normal teenager, but unlike most teenagers, she can tell time without a clock. She still wears a watch, but it comes with incriminating A.I. software. It's part of her fashion sense-if you call a mix of 80's nostalgia, geekism, and jagged hair a fashion sense. Otherwise, you have a normal, nineteen-year-old girl who delivers pizza and tacos by day and hacks cybersecurity networks by night. All the while, she turns heads, probably because she performs her job on a gravity board, which is relatively unorthodox in a future where aliens rule the planet.

The alien takeover could have ended more violently, but there's irony in how efficient and peaceful Earth has become a hundred years later. Corporations still reign supreme, but aliens lie at the top of the social ladder. Azareans they call them, overlords who've constructed a new kind of city for the modern world. The Eden: a modern megapolis.

Accustomed to life in the modern city, Jessica has learned to embrace challenge when it comes her way. Without a cause, she confides in her three friends or smacks into boredom. And when she seamlessly cracks an uncrackable corporate security algorithm, nothing makes sense. Faced with world-turning revelations, the life she's led seems trivial next to a hundred-year lie and tragedy.

Hacking the Sun

New Sumer had fourteen minutes until something somewhereÑpeople somewhereÑsuffered at the hands of the so-called Sub Terra.


Hushed playbacks of the seething voiceover lingered, score to the citywide countdown. "A free Earth... Be the resistance... Fight, humanity..." On and on.


No room for debate. A long time ago, somebody implemented a mandate, that civilians with knowledge of CPR would save absolute strangers. This seemed no different, albeit trickier and a little more frightening. 


"Might as well call me Jessica 'Trick' Leibniz!" she exclaimed with bravado. Her eyes fell, and her lips pinched together. "I know what you would do, dad." Her feet had already brought her back to Goliath HQ.


The white suits at the front desk were distracted, shouting into their ear-pieces. Therefore, she simply speed-walked up the stairs. To her bad luck, the security guard hadn't moved, somehow oblivious to the uproar. 


"I hoped you would be gone," she muttered.


Chapter 21: Epistemology Part 1